THE CHOICE: Global Domination or Global Leadership
Review by G. JOHN IKENBERRY
       

The United States is in the midst of a great debate about national security.

 

The last great debate was in the 1940's as American officials struggled to cope with the insecurities generated by postwar Soviet power and global Communism. That era's search for security transformed the American relationship with the world, yielding a global system of alliances, doctrines of containment and deterrence and commitments to multilateral cooperation.

 

A half-century later, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, painfully revealed a post-cold-war world menaced by new threats, and the Bush administration moved quickly to articulate a new vision of national security organized around pre-emption, coalitions of the willing, and the unfettered use of American military power. While critics have vigorously faulted the administration for its unilateralism and a rush to war in Iraq, they have offered o­nly glimmerings of an alternative national security vision.

 

Until now. The debate is now fully joined with “The Choice” by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the single most lucid and systematic statement of America's 21st-century security challenges yet to appear. For those troubled by President Bush's “war o­n terrorism” approach to national security, the flag of the opposition has finally and firmly been planted. Together, this new book by the distinguished scholar-diplomat and the Bush administration's 2002 national security strategy define the parameters of the establishment debate o­n national security.

 

Mr. Brzezinski says that American national security is profoundly tied to international security, and so the country's security is increasingly in the hands of others. The old link between national sovereignty and national security has finally been severed. In this new era the United States must be willing to work with other democracies to reduce the “convulsive and percolating strife” that lies behind today's global violence and terrorism.

 

Accordingly, Mr. Brzezinski argues that Washington must use this moment of unrivaled American power to build an “increasingly formalized global community of shared interest” that can provide a long-term basis for global peace and security. If the slogan of the Bush administration is “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people,” Mr. Brzezinski's slogan might be “America will never be able to defend the security of its people without the help of others.”

 

His critique of the Bush administration's approach is understated but hard-hitting, and it is effective precisely because he accepts two key White House assumptions. He agrees that American power is indispensable in providing the framework for global order.

 

Mr. Brzezinski also accepts the administration's view that the United States faces radically new security problems in which the threats are coming not from established great powers but from illiberal states, backward societies and aggrieved peoples. Globalization and the growing ease of communication and transport project American ideas and society into the world but also provide tools for the weak to organize and hit back.

 

But Mr. Brzezinski parts company with President Bush in three fundamental respects. First, he argues that the “war o­n terrorism” is not an adequate or unifying mission for American foreign policy. Terrorism is a tactic  —  and so to declare war o­n terrorism is equivalent to Franklin D. Roosevelt's declaring war o­n blitzkrieg. The Bush administration's “theological approach” to terrorism, in which we are in a struggle between good and evil and others are either with us or against us, is too abstract, politically unsustainable, and inevitably leads to scare-mongering. It is also an inadequate diagnosis of the problem and, in the end, other countries whose cooperation we need won't sign o­n to it.

 

Second, Mr. Brzezinski argues that an adequate approach to terrorism must focus o­n the historical and political context in which violence is generated. Lurking behind every terrorist act is a political problem. A “careful political strategy is needed in order to weaken the complex political and cultural forces that give rise to terrorism,” he says. “What creates them has to be politically undercut.” The American reluctance to confront the sources of Islamic radicalism, rooted in the modern history of the Middle East, is in Mr. Brzezinski's view a dangerous form of denial. To simply say that terrorists hate freedom is to miss the impulses that underlie their actions.

 

Perhaps most important, he argues that American moral authority is the country's most prized asset and has been squandered by the Bush administration's arrogation of the unilateral right to define threats and use force. “America's global military credibility has never been higher, yet its global political credibility has never been lower,” he says. Ultimately American power is enhanced if it is legitimate, and this means that Washington must concert its power with other states and exercise consensual leadership.

 

Mr. Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, began his career as a scholar of Soviet power and geopolitics, so it is not surprising that he is most penetrating in his discussion of the character and limits of American power. He is less illuminating in his depiction of how consensual hegemony or an American-led concert of great powers might operate.

 

He also finds himself bumping up against the same problem that confounds Republican hard-liners. Both sides agree that American security is enhanced by the enlargement of “zones of global stability,” best pursued by reducing the misery and injustice that cause political violence and by promoting human rights and democracy. But the problem is the sheer intractability of this challenge.

 

In the end Mr. Brzezinski poses but does not really answer the essential question: Can a democratic superpower, rendered vulnerable by hidden and uncertain threats, advance its security by strengthening and binding itself to the world, or will it lash out in a way that leaves itself isolated? The good news is that the last time the United States had a grand debate o­n national security, it did ultimately act in its enlightened self-interest.

 

[G. John Ikenberry is the Peter F. Krogh professor of geopolitics and global justice at Georgetown University and a trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.]