"There are three different kinds of brains, the one understands things unassisted, the other understands things when shown by others, the third understands neither alone nor with the explanations of others."
Niccolo Machiavelli
Our inquiry into national security strategy begins by exploring the nature of the assumptions that typically underpin strategists' thinking. Whether we fully appreciate it or not, each of us brings to the task of strategic analysis a set of convictions about such matters as how the world works, the motivations of major foreign actors, the nature of the national interest and the most important threats to it, the characteristics and utility of the major instruments of power, the sorts of foreign policy goals or alternatives that the American public is prepared to support, and what America's proper role in the world ought to be. Often so deeply buried in our consciousness that we hardly realize their influence on our thinking, those assumptions inevitably exert a major influence on the direction our analysis takes.
Sound strategic thinking properly begins with a process of making explicit and then critically examining those assumptions. It requires a kind of provisional agnosticism, a willingness constantly to keep an open mind and continually to re-evaluate conclusions in the light of new evidence. One way to become sensitive to one's own assumptions is to look at the clusters of interrelated views that foreign affairs analysts have traditionally held, views that have distinguished them as realists, idealists, internationalists or isolationists. Another is to explore the kinds of ideas that the American public typically brings to its consideration of foreign affairs, ideas that roughly parallel the more sophisticated assumptions of professionals. The structure of informed public opinion is, of course, not only a clue to one's own assumptions but also worth studying as an important part of the domestic context within which the strategist functions.
In this section, then, we consider the nature of national security strategy and how it compares with strategy on other levels (Topic 1); the sorts of assumptions that under gird the major theoretical approaches to foreign policy and strategy (Topic 2); and the structure of popular perceptions and attitudes that define the domestic context for U.S. statecraft (Topic 3).
TOPIC 1: SECURITY AND STRATEGY IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA
"Security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values; in a subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked."
Arnold Wolfers
Since the end of the Cold War almost everything in American national security policy is open for debate, and that includes the meaning of the term national security itself. Narrow definitions can cause statesmen to focus strategies on how to use military power to defend against military threats. But the concept can also be defined in a complex and multidimensional way so as to require far more than just the procurement, deployment and employment of military forces.National security has economic, political, diplomatic and social dimensions as well as a military dimension, and strategists soon learn that security itself is difficult to weigh and is always measured in degrees. Since absolute security against all threats is unattainable, strategists must decide what level of insecurity they are willing to accept, a determination that depends both on the nature and extent of those threats and on how much the state is able and willing to spend to defend against them.
The readings assigned below introduce many of the issues that the rest of the course treats in more detail, beginning with the nature of security itself. First, Ronald Steel asks you to rethink the idea of security in international affairs and what it means in the post-Cold War era. Then veteran diplomat Chester Crocker helps us define security strategy and offers his views of why designing it is so challenging today. Finally, starting from the premise that the lapse of our post-Cold War strategy of containment has produced "confusion" in our foreign policy, Richard Haass sketches the broad frameworks that might be available to address the quintessential strategic task: relating available means to our chosen ends.
Topic objectives
- Review the structure and logic of Course 5601.
- Understand the nature of national security strategy and how it differs from strategy at other levels.
- Consider how U.S. national security has been affected by the end of the Cold War.
Questions for Discussion
- Should we define "national security" differently today than we did during the Cold War era? Why or why not? Do conditions in the post-Cold War era require that our definitions of security be expanded to include a variety of non-military factors, or should it be much more restricted even than that used during the Cold War, as Ronald Steel argues?
- Can a concept of national security include only external threats, or should it also embrace internal threats as well? What are the dangers of the latter course in a constitutional democracy?
- How would you define "strategy"? What must its central elements be, and how do they interrelate?
- Is it possible today to develop a new central organizing construct for U.S. national security strategy to replace containment, or are we likely to formulate security policy on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis for the foreseeable future, as Richard Haass predicts?
- What do you anticipate the major themes in American foreign policy will be during the next decade?
Required Readings
* Ronald Steel, "A New Realism," World Policy Journal 14 (Summer 1997): 1-9. (Reprint)
* Chester A. Crocker, "Contemporary Challenges for the Foreign Policy Strategist," Inaugural Lectures, James R. Schlesinger Program in Strategic Studies (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1998), pp. 1-7. (Reprint)
* Richard N. Haass, "Paradigm Lost," Foreign Affairs 74 (January-February 1995): 43-58. (Reprint)
Supplemental Readings
* John Lewis Gaddis, "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," International Security 17 (Winter 1992/93): 5-58.
TOPIC 2: CONTENDING TRADITIONS IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT
My approach was strategic and geopolitical; I attempted to relate events to each other, to create incentives or pressures in one part of the world to influence events in another."
Henry A. Kissinger
Among the myriad of assumptions strategists carry about in their heads, perhaps none are more consequential than those relating to the shape and operation of the international system. Many of these assumptions concern the nature of power within the system: whether it is concentrated in a few actors or diffused across many; whether it is essentially military, economic, or ideological in nature; whether it imparts a unipolar, bipolar, multipolar, or other structure to the system. Other assumptions relate to the actors who constitute the system: how they govern themselves; whether only governments of nation-states can be considered actors or whether so-called non-state entities play a role; what exactly the capabilities and intentions of the actors are. Still others address the mechanisms which determine system interaction, like public opinion, the character of internal governments, international law, or a balance of power.
The answers given by American strategists over the years to such questions have tended to coalesce into two more or less distinct schools; moreover, each view of how the world works has given rise to its own prescription for the best American foreign policy to deal with such a world. These schools might be diagramed as follows:
- REALISM/REALPOLITIK
Geopolitics, Balance of Power
IDEALISM/MORALISM
Liberalism, Collective Security
Realists tend to consider nation-states as the only real actors in the international system and to focus on power, particularly military power, as the only reliable guide to state behavior. Through the window of geopolitics, they look systematically at the characteristic patterns imparted to the international system by the varied distribution of power among nation-states and at how a state's location and other geographical characteristics affect its power. Indeed, geopoliticians are particularly interested in discovering and explaining how control over various regions of the globe might give certain states the opportunity to amass enough power to control the globe itself.
However, beginning in the 1970s, liberal analysts have argued that the international system is now far too complex to be entirely captured by a model focussing exclusively on sovereign state actors and the politico-military relationships among them. For alongside and intermingled with states have appeared increasing numbers of so-called "non-state" actors -- organizations and individuals as diverse as Rotary International, Sony Corporation, Kofi Annan, and the International Red Cross -- whose transnational interactions have profound effects on the efforts of nation-states to control their domestic and international environments and accomplish their policy goals. These writers ask us to imagine a world where nation-states have lost their hard outer shells, non-state actors strongly affect government policies, economic issues crowd the agenda, hierarchies of power disintegrate, allies and adversaries constantly shift according to the nature of the issue at hand, and traditional forms of power may be irrelevant to outcomes.
Just as liberals question the realist image of international reality, so do idealists reject the policy prescriptions that flow from the realist worldview. As Paul Seabury explains in the reading assigned below, idealists consider balance of power thinking foreign in origin, amoral in nature, and the cause of endless wars. In fact, idealists believe that ideas are more important than power, and they base their policy prescriptions on the American experience with democracy and federalism. Just as the Constitution provided a means for the American states to live in peace, so a new world order should be based on collective security, a concept they believe can be a substitute for the balance of power. In a reading assigned below Inis Claude compares the balance of power to collective security and its close analogues, world federalism and functionalism.
Realists, however, remain extremely skeptical of the workability of anything except a balance of power approach. They agree that the "idealist/legalist" approach to international affairs is part of the American tradition, but they argue that it is precisely such soft-headed thinking that has gotten the country into trouble overseas time and again. The idea that what works in the United States will work with other people from vastly different situations and cultures, the view that written rules can change state behavior, and the belief that goodness can triumph over power are all viewed by the realist as fostering a purely American policy cycle of global crusades alternating with sullen withdrawal.
Realist-idealist differences are worth careful consideration, for they explain part of the current debate over post-Cold War U.S. national security strategy. The schools of thought described by Paul Seabury across the sweep of American diplomatic history are personified in the reading by the realist Henry Kissinger, who compares the policy approaches of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson - archetypical examples of the realist and idealist schools, respectively. Steve Walt, on the other hand, picks up where Seabury leaves off, updating these older theoretical models with the latest scholarship. Walt also touches on such radical approaches as marxism, dependency theory, and constructivism, the last of which echos idealism in its emphasis on the power of ideas to shape statecraft.
Topic Objectives
- Review the structure and logic of Course 5601.
- Understand the nature of national security strategy and how it differs from strategy at other levels.
- Consider how U.S. national security has been affected by the end of the Cold War.
Questions for Discussion
- What does the term "balance of power" mean? Should American statecraft be based on it? Does any other model better explain the dynamic pattern of world politics at the state level today?
- What conditions are required for the balance of power to remain in stable equilibrium? Will those conditions be apparent in the coming international system?
- How would you define the idea of collective security? How does it differ from the balance of power? Are the two at all compatible? What kind of collective security system might function, if any, in the current international system?
- What is meant by constructivism? Functionalism? World federalism? Do any of these more radical approaches capture important characteristics of the modern international system or help us to understand its operation?
- After digesting the readings for this topic, would you characterize yourself more as a realist or an idealist? Why?
Required Readings
* Paul Seabury, "Realism and Idealism," in Alexander deConde, ed., Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), pp. 856-66. (Reprint)
* Henry Kissinger, "The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson," Chapter 2 in Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 29-55. (Reprint)
* Stephen M. Walt, "International Relations: One World, Many Theories," Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 29-32, 34-47. (Reprint)
* Inis L. Claude, Jr., "Theoretical Approaches to National Security and World Order," Chapter 2 in John Norton Moore (ed.), National Security Law (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1990), pp. 31-45. (Reprint)
Supplemental Readings
* Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939. London: MacMillan & Co., 1940.
* Michael C. Desch, "Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies," International Security 23 (Summer 1998): 141-170.
* Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
* Ted Hopf, "The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory," International Security 23 (Summer 1998): 171-200.
* George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950. Chicago: Mentor/University of Chicago Press, 1951.
* Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition.
* Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1977.
* Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace," International Security 19 (Fall 1994): 5-49.
* John M. Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security 19 (Fall 1994): 87-125.
* Gideon Rose, "Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy," World Politics 51 (October 1998): 144-172.
* Frank Tannenbaum, The American Tradition in Foreign Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
* Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979.
TOPIC 3: THE SHAPE OF AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION
"Since the time when Thomas Jefferson insisted upon a 'decent respect to the opinions of mankind,' public opinion has controlledforeign policy in all democracies."
Cordell Hull
The entire program of study at the National War College is designed to improve the quality of strategic thinking by the men and women who will be making national security strategy --or advising those who make it-- "from the top down," based on reasoned analysis and cool logic rooted in the national interest. But in a democracy such as ours, the national interest also is constantly being determined "from the bottom up," by the people. And nothing is more legitimate: the Congress, not the presidency, is after all the subject of Article I in the Constitution.
Still, policymakers often find themselves frustrated by the seeming illogic of apparently uninformed public views on foreign policy issues, an uncertain yet highly consequential factor in their strategic calculations. Indeed, one of the real challenges for national security strategists is to understand public opinion and its expression in Congress so thoroughly that they reflect it in their strategic designs, lead it in their preferred directions, and use it for their own purposes.
Fortunately, public reactions are not entirely random and unpredictable. Public opinion polling is far from an exact science, but professional pollsters now have several decades of data from which conclusions can be drawn about the consistency and structure of public attitudes. The readings below fall into three quite different categories. First, as background for the more scientific articles to follow, a piece by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich illuminates images deep in the American subconscious that have a powerful effect on reactions to policy issues. Then analyses by Wittkopf and Hinckley offer models of the underlying structure of American public opinion on foreign policy, placing individuals into categories on the basis of whether they favor U.S. involvement in international affairs or not, whether they want American involvement to be independent or cooperative, and whether they favor or reject the use of military force. Finally, the extensive recent poll of the public and American leaders by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations offers a snapshot of American public opinion in late 1998. For this topic we will read the executive summary and introductory chapters, returning to the detailed material later to check the attitudes of leaders and the public on the topics ahead.
Topic Objectives
- Become familiar with various models of popular and elite attitudes toward foreign policy.
- Appreciate how popular perceptions and public opinion set the parameters for national security strategy.
- Consider how deeply engrained images may affect your reaction to particular policy issues.
Questions for Discussion
- Which of the models presented in today's readings seems most useful in understanding how Americans react to foreign policy issues and problems?
- How concerned is the public today about foreign policy? How does it weigh the balance between domestic and international concerns? To what extent do Americans see their domestic interests being affected by international affairs?
- What, if any, foreign policy-related issues rank high on the American public's agenda?
- How does public opinion affect the national interest? What should its role be in the strategic calculus?
- To what extent can national policymakers shape domestic opinion? Can leaders, in fact, "lead" the public, or should policymakers take their cues from their reading of domestic public opinion?
Required Readings
* Robert B. Reich, "Four Morality Tales," Chapter 1 in Tales of a New America (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), pp. 3-19. (Reprint)
* Eugene R. Wittkopf, "Americans' Foreign Policy Beliefs and Behavior at the Water's Edge," International Studies Notes 22 (Fall 1997): 1-8. (Reprint)
* Ronald H. Hinckley, People, Polls, and Policymakers (New York: Lexington Books/Macmillan, 1992), Chapters 2-4, pp. 9-29. (Reprint)
* John E. Reilly, ed., "The Survey in Context," "The Findings in Summary," and Chapter 1, "The Priority of Foreign Policy," in American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1999 (Chicago, IL: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), pp. 1-9. (Student Issue)
Supplemental Readings
* Americans Talk Issues, Americans Talk Security, ongoing series of intensive public opinion studies on Americans' attitudes on national security, foreign and public policy issues (Winchester, MA: Alan F. Kay Foundation, 1987-present).
* William O. Chittick, Keith R. Billingsley, and Rick Travis, "A Three-Dimensional Model of American Foreign Policy Beliefs," International Studies Quarterly 39 (September 1995): 313-332.
* Aaron L. Friedberg, "Are Americans Becoming Isolationist?" Commentary 106 (November 1998): 45-48.
* Steven Kull, "What the Public Knows that Washington Doesn't," Foreign Policy 101 (Winter 1995-96): 102-115.
* Ole Holsti, PublicOpinion and American Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
* William Martin, "The Christian Right and American Foreign Policy," Foreign Policy 114 (Spring 1999): 66-80.
* Eugene R. Wittkopf, "What Americans Really Think About Foreign Policy," Washington Quarterly 19 (Summer 1996): 91-106.
* Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
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