The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 120
II
As he managed the Cold War’s endgame, President Bush proved reluctant to prognosticate on the era to come and inarticulate when he tried. His vision for a “new world order,” for example, was couched in generalities. Clearer long-term thinking emerged instead from the Defense Department, which was on the hook for a widely anticipated “peace dividend” as the Cold War wound down. In response to this budgetary reality, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, each undertook reviews of US defense policy, strategy, force posture, and programs beginning in late 1989.
By early 1990, Powell had proposed the “Base Force,” which would reorganize the military for regional conflicts in which the Soviet Union was not a direct participant. This approach marked a significant departure from the Pentagon’s decades-long preparations for global war with the Soviets, prioritizing instead the capacity for a global response to unexpected crises. The resultant plan emphasized maintaining overseas “presence” rather than “permanently stationed forces,” while a larger US-based “contingency force” would be able to respond to emergencies as they arose. Under this approach, Powell anticipated that the United States would require a total military end strength of 1.6 million active duty service members, down from over 2.1 million at the time of his appointment.12 In the face of demands for a peace dividend, Powell viewed the Base Force as “a floor below which the United States could not go and carry out its responsibilities as a superpower.”13
Concurrently, Wolfowitz assigned a team working under I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Principal Under Secretary for Strategy and Resources, to undertake its own strategy review, resulting in a concept called “crisis response/reconstitution.” Like the Joint Staff study under Powell, the civilian team focused on the need to respond to regional contingencies in a post-Cold War world. What distinguished the civilian effort was its contemplation of a wide range of underlying scenarios, from a future characterized by peaceful competition to a renewed Soviet threat. Because Wolfowitz was more skeptical than Powell that relations with the Soviet Union would continue to warm, his concept emphasized the need for a plan to “reconstitute” US global forces if the United States again faced the threat of global war.14
In June 1990, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney packaged the two proposals. Wolfowitz’s team had provided a clearer policy roadmap, while Powell had delivered the endorsement of his fellow chiefs of staff for his planned force cuts. President Bush rolled out the new strategy in a speech he delivered on August 2 at the Aspen Institute. In his remarks, Bush described “a world where the size of our forces will increasingly be shaped by the needs of regional contingencies and peacetime presence,” concluding that, by 1995, the active military could be reduced by some twenty-five percent, as proposed by Powell. Concurrently, Bush noted that the new strategy would “guard against a major reversal in Soviet intentions by incorporating … the concept of reconstitution,” which would retain the readiness to “generate wholly new forces.”15
The president’s remarks in Aspin were immediately overshadowed by Iraq’s simultaneous invasion of Kuwait. The crisis provided the Pentagon with a brief reprieve from budgetary pressure, but also postponed further work on long-term strategy. The effort was picked up again in the development of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), a document that set forth the Pentagon’s force planning and resource priorities. An initial draft was prepared in September 1991 before Zalmay Khalilzad, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, took the lead in writing a revised draft near the end of the year.
Written in the wake of victory over Iraq and the dissolution of the Soviet Union the year before, the February 1992 DPG draft argued that the United States’ “first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that pose formerly by the Soviet Union.” The draft identified a three-part strategy to avoid such a worst-case scenario. First, the United States should “show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order” that convinces potential competitors that they need not “aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” Second, in “non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership.” Third, the United States must “maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors to even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”16
When the February draft of the DPG was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post, furor ensued. The Times reported that the draft made the “case for a world dominated by one superpower” and articulated “the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism” in favor of United States unilateral power.17 The leak elicited criticism from both Congress, where Senator Joseph Biden called it “literally a Pax Americana” that “won’t work,” and the White House, where Scowcroft called the draft “nutty” and “kooky.”18 Despite the criticism, the draft DPG flowed directly from upon the strategy that President Bush had articulated in August 1990. The most significant change was that the post-Soviet context dramatically elevated the implications of the DPG’s “reconstitution” strategy. Cheney defended the draft strategy in an op-ed published in the New York Times and released a final version of the guidance retitled the Regional Defense Strategy (RDS) in January 1993.
The Regional Defense Strategy articulated the template for the United States’ post-Cold War strategy. It committed the United States to “shaping an uncertain future so as to preserve and enhance the zone of peace” in the West. It described the necessity of working with the “states of the former Soviet Union in establishing democratic political systems and free markets so they too can join the democratic ‘zone of peace.’ ” It emphasized that the United States must “preclude hostile, nondemocratic states from dominating regions of the world critical to us.” Furthermore, it noted that the United States should “help preclude conflict by reducing sources of regional instability” and “limit violence should conflict occur.”19 The goals identified in the Regional Defense Strategy would largely define those outlined by future administrations.
Combined, the Base Force and the Regional Defense Strategy established what would become the standard, force-sizing criterion of the post-Cold War period, the “two-major regional contingency” (MRC) standard. The two-MRC concept rested on the essential proposition that, if the United States was engaged in conflict in one theater, a potential adversary would be tempted to initiate conflict elsewhere if it believed the United States could not respond. When presenting the Base Force concept to Congress near the end of the Bush administration, Powell testified that the Base Force would be able to accommodate one MRC “with great difficulty” but that two-MRC scenarios would put the force “at the breaking point.” As a later analysis concluded, “Although the origins of the two-[MRC] standard were inauspicious, they would, with the [Bottom-Up Review] and [Quadrennial Defense Review], come to constitute high canon for defense planning.”20
Finally, the team working under Wolfowitz introduced the concept of “reconstitution,” which addressed a fundamental question as to how the United States should maintain its military overmatch if faced with “a new global threat or some emergent alliance of hostile, nondemocratic regional powers.”21 The reconstitution strategy was derived, in the first instance, from the Pentagon civilians’ skepticism that the Soviet threat had truly receded in the period 1989–90. That concern would evolve in the development of the draft DPG and RDS to reflect a concern about future, prospective adversaries, that would demand greater capacity than the Base Force could deliver. Cheney and his advisors had come to accept that a post-Cold War period had dawned and they described how the United States should posture itself if it should end.
III
“It’s the economy, stupid.” The poster in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters starkly declared the candidate’s agenda before the 1992 election. As a candidate, Clinton knew that the election would not be won over questions of foreign policy. As president, he would privately belittle the importance of grand strategy, arguing that his predecessors Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had “just made it up as they went along.”22 Despite his lack of interest in the topic, however, Clinton sought to distinguish himself from Bush on two basic points.
First, Clinton placed a premium on human rights and democracy promotion. Clinton argued that Bush had prioritized “personal relationships with foreign leaders [over] how those leaders acquired and maintained their power.”23 This neo-Wilsonian tilt in Clinton’s rhetoric was associated with Anthony Lake, who advised the campaign and would eventually be appointed as Clinton’s first national security advisor. It also coopted congressional Democrats’ attacks on Bush’s rapprochement with the Chinese leadership following the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989 as well as his opposition to independence movements within the collapsing Soviet Union in 1990–91. Although Clinton pledged to revoke China’s most-favored nation (MFN) trading status and impose human rights sanctions, he punted the issue for a year before “de-linking” trade from human rights in 1994.
Second, Clinton doubled down on Bush’s gauzy rhetoric about the United Nations, arguing that “multilateralism holds promise like never before” while expressing support for a “new voluntary UN rapid deployment force.”24 This theme was most clearly articulated by Madeline Albright, who coined the term “assertive multilateralism,” to describe the incoming administration’s preference for working through the United Nations. This preference for multilateral action did not just echo Bush’s view that UN support could provide a “cloak of legitimacy” for American action. It also offered “a relatively low-cost strategy for dealing with what were already considered low-priority issues.”25
The Clinton administration’s efforts to enlist multilateral support, however, quickly proved tough sledding. In December 1992, the outgoing Bush administration had deployed US military personnel to Somalia on a humanitarian assistance mission. The Clinton team worked at the United Nations to expand the mission to encompass what Albright described as “an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations.”26
The rapidly deteriorating situation in the Balkans proved even more confounding. The Bush administration had avoided entanglement in the conflicts that accompanied Yugoslavia’s breakup. Instead, as events in the Balkans took their course, Europe was haunted by the dual specters of bloodletting on a scale unseen since 1945 and competing interests among NATO allies toward the conflict. For its part, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo in September 1991, which left Serbia, widely viewed as the aggressor in the conflict, with a significant military advantage. Fighting worsened after Clinton backed away from an early effort to intervene, leading French President Jacque Chirac to eventually observe that the position of leader of the free world was “vacant.”27
Stung by criticism over his handling of foreign affairs, Clinton directed his foreign policy team to develop a coherent explanation for his approach to the world during the summer of 1993. Primary responsibility for the task fell on Lake, who coordinated a series of speeches by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Albright, Clinton, and Lake himself leading up to the UN General Assembly meeting in late September.
Of the speeches, Lake’s provided the most compelling vision for the need for a strategy of “enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies” to replace the legacy of Cold War containment. Lake argued that current debates about Bosnia, Somalia, and “multilateralism” were “overdrawn,” as none of those hot-button issues “by themselves define our broader strategy in the world.”28 Instead, he argued that the administration was pursing a four-part strategy that would: 1) strengthen the “core” of major market democracies “from which enlargement is spreading”; 2) “foster and consolidate new democracies and market economies” in the wake of Communism’s collapse in Europe; 3) “counter the aggression” of “backlash states” like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that are “hostile to democracy and markets”; and 4) pursue a humanitarian agenda that would both provide aid and help democracy and market economies “take root in regions of greatest humanitarian concern.”29 With but modest edits, these goals could have come directly from Cheney’s Regional Defense Strategy.
Lake’s remarks provided guidance for US relations with the other great powers. He noted that “our principal concerns should be” directed toward the first three items in the strategy, rather than the humanitarian crises that were dominating headlines.30 He emphasized the importance of the conclusion of negotiations toward the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and a renewed role for NATO in the post-Cold War world. Lake discussed the importance of helping to consolidate democratic and market reforms in Russia and the other newly independent states, with the goal of turning them into “valued diplomatic and economic partners.” These major emphases, however, were principally to be achieved through diplomacy and economic statecraft. The primary target for military strategy, in Lake’s telling, was to prepare for the challenge posed by “backlash states” and humanitarian missions.
Responsibility for military strategy fell to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who was also charged with making defense-spending cuts of more than $100 billion beyond those that had been proposed by the Bush administration.31 Aspin brought to the task an approach he had developed while chairing the House Armed Services Committee, where he had proposed a Bottom-Up Review (BUR) as an alternative to the Base Force. Because the BUR focused on regional threats in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula, an immediate question was whether to maintain a two-MRC standard, like that established in the Bush administration. Aspin proposed instead a “win-hold-win” strategy that would respond to simultaneous regional conflicts in sequence. In the face of congressional criticism and concerns expressed by allies, however, he relented, concluding that the US military must be capable of “fighting and winning two major regional conflicts that occur nearly simultaneously,” given that “a potential aggressor in one region … [would] be tempted to take advantage if we are already engaged in halting aggression in another.”32
The Bottom-Up Review also directed the United States to anticipate a larger role in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations, giving such activities the same footing as being prepared for major regional conflicts and peacetime oversees presence. The strategy noted, however, that “the military capabilities needed for these operations are largely those maintained for other purposes,” such that they could be drawn from general purposes forces and provided specialized training and equipment as necessary.33 As one study observed, the BUR gave “increased rhetorical and policy importance to U.S. participation in multilateral peace and humanitarian operations while setting the stage for an increased operational tempo and rate of deployment even as force reductions continued.”34
One Cheney-era concept that the BUR dropped was “reconstitution” in anticipation of the prospect of a future near-peer aggressor. Instead, the BUR supposed that a force built on the two-MRC standard would provide a sufficient “hedge against the possibility that a future adversary might one day confront us with a larger-than-expected threat.”35 This change marked a step towards the adoption of American primacy as an assumption of policy rather than an objective. It is unsurprising that this exclusion was satisfactory to Powell, since Aspin’s final report resulted in relatively modest cuts relative to the Base Force and the reconstitution concept that had been driven by the civilians working under Wolfowitz. In the end, Powell was satisfied to declare that the Base Force was a “linear ancestor” of the BUR on what he viewed as the most important matters.36
Despite Lake’s protestations during his September speech about the debates over Somalia and Bosnia being “overdrawn,” the botched raid on a Somali warlord on October 3 threw the Clinton administration’s strategy rollout into disarray. The incident, which led to the deaths of nineteen soldiers, spurred deeper opposition to US participation in UN peacekeeping operations, and led the administration to formally decide that US personnel should never serve under a UN command. Aspin would resign by December, having served less than a year at the Pentagon.
The Bosnian conflict would provide redemption for the Clinton administration’s strategy when the president finally accepted that muscular leadership would be necessary to both preserve the “core” of the market democracies and to respond to a worsening humanitarian disaster. The bloodletting in Bosnia worsened in 1995, punctuated by the Srebrenica massacre in July and the Sarajevo marketplace bombing in August. In response, the United States demanded negotiations and led massive NATO airstrikes. Under the capable management of Richard Holbrooke, the eventual negotiations resulted in the Dayton Accords, which ended the fighting and established a tenuous, multi-ethnic peace in Bosnia.
Success in Bosnia helped to springboard the Clinton administration’s decision to move forward with the enlargement of NATO, which would eventually add the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, while also initiating membership planning for another nine newly independent states. Secretary of State Warren Christopher emphasized the importance of one for the other, stating that while “Bosnia was unresolved, it was a cloud hanging over our heads”—“if NATO could not find a solution for Bosnia, then why think about enlarging it.”37 In 1999, the Clinton administration would again go to war in Europe, conducting a months-long aerial campaign against the Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in response to his aggression against the enclave of Kosovo. Europe proved to be the model for the elements of “engagement and enlargement” that most closely mirrored the ambitions of the Regional Defense Strategy.
