The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for World powers
Worlds in Collision: New Evidence on the Role of Ideology in the Origins and Early Development of the Cold War
The Resurrection of A Russian Hero…
As Stalin’s rehabilitation proceeds with renewed vigor in popular, academic and official circles of Putin’s Russia, the Soviet dictator is invariably re-presented as a great modernizer, war leader and international statesman – a true “vohzd” who industrialized Russia, defeated Hitter’s Nazi scourge and negotiated on an equal footing with Roosevelt and Churchill. Yet this latest re-incarnation of the “Red Boss” as the ultimate realpolitiker, whose principal aim was always Russia’s grandeur, security and recognition as one of the two equal superpowers of the post-World War Two world is, at best, a misleadingly incomplete narrative of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during the Stalin Era. The opening of the archives of former Communist countries in the wake of the implosion of Communist rule in Europe resulted in a substantial amount of new research focusing on the critical role played by ideology in shaping Soviet foreign policy in general, and the origins and early course of the Cold War in particular.
Stalin and government in 1938, with head of NKVD Nikolay Yezhov far right
The predominant weight of evidence presented by these findings points to a fresh understanding of the causes and development of the Cold War, which emerges as the most likely outcome of a strategic confrontation between the foreign policy epistemic communities of the leading proponents of two mutually exclusive views of the constitutional structure of global order. Its determinant cause thus becomes the conscious refusal of these foreign policy elites to subordinate their respective paradigm of the moral purposes of the state to their adversary’s “horizon of experience” – defined as “the deep-seated ideological assumptions that lead states to formulate their interests within certain bounds, making some actions seem mandatory and others unimaginable”.
This essay will interpret the most representative findings of this new research through the prism of Christian Reus-Smit’s innovative holistic constructivist framework emerging out of his historically-grounded sociological comparison of four distinct societies of states: ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist and modern Europe. Each such society of states was structured around a different understanding of the moral purpose of the state, unique conceptualization of the organizing principles of sovereignty, and particular systemic notion of procedural justice, resulting in four “coherent ensemble[s] of metavalues, defining the terms of legitimate statehood and broad parameters of state action”. We will focus on three critical series of events which best assisted historians to reassess the causes, outbreak and early development of the Cold War: the foreign policy process of the USSR in the 1940s, the impact of the 1947 Marshall Plan on US-Soviet relations, and the re-organization of the Communist bloc between 1947 and 1950.
Stalin’s Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1940s
Despite the wealth of new evidence from former Communist states’ archives which has come to light since 1989, controversies regarding the role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy and its impact on the origins and development of the early Cold War have by no means been settled. A detailed analysis of even the most important lines of argument and the various debates they generated among historians is well beyond the scope of this essay. We will therefore focus on key points of agreement between them and on the actual evidence on which they based their arguments. We will thus develop a new understanding of this “hinge” period of the Twentieth Century: the transition between the Second World War and the Cold War.
Perhaps the most important such point of agreement is the critical role played by Stalin in determining not only the foreign policy of the USSR during this period, but that of the entire Eastern bloc. Zubok and Pleshakov have best described his role as the wielder of a “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” representing a marriage of Russian imperial geopolitics with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary idealism, resulting in a more or less skillful and successful exploitation of both the strategic attributes of the former Russian Empire’s territory and of the emotive power of Russian nationalism to safeguard and expand the Communist revolution as directed by the CPSU elites by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” literally embodied in the person of the “Boss” himself.
Blum’s conceptualization, at the agency level, of a hierarchical, tri-partite belief system of core, intermediate and peripheral beliefs in examining evolution and change in Soviet foreign policy from Stalin to Gorbachev, which mirrors Reus Smit’s “generative structure” of modern international society at the structural level, based on constitutional structures, fundamental institutions, and issue-specific regimes, will both help us to situate Stalin’s role and the impact of the revolutionary-imperial paradigm on Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1940s. Stalin’s core level of beliefs, personified in the dominant role he created for the CPSU and its General Secretary in the governance structure of the USSR by sidelining both the original Soviets and the more traditional state functions of President and Ministers in favor of an inner circle he could direct and control, is based on his formative years as a revolutionary and his unstinting, if not always sophisticated, belief in and adherence to the Marxist principles of global revolution arising out of the inevitable conflict between the major capitalist countries promoting the interests of their respective national forces of monopoly capital. This core set of beliefs, on which the entire ideological, structural and operational framework of the Bolshevik Party, the CPSU and the USSR was constructed by Lenin himself even before the October 1917 Revolution, represents Stalin’s “horizon of experience”, from which everything else in his belief system is ultimately derived.
The imperial-revolutionary paradigm, corresponding to Blum’s intermediate set of beliefs, constituted a flexible framework of foreign policy decision-making and control of his closest collaborators, which Stalin employed to advance the revolutionary cause both within and outside the USSR. Its two key axes, one gravitating between a national / imperialist pole and a communist /revolutionary pole, and a second oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state, gave rise to four distinct foreign policy approaches: great power politics, most compatible with the Western society of states defended by the USA and the UK, and best illustrated in the diplomatic activities and writings of Litvinov and Maisky; cooperative internationalism as exemplified in positions taken by Beria and Malenkov both before and after Stalin’s death; aggressive imperialism, evident in the Soviet identification of security with continuous territorial expansion; and global revolutionary, emphasizing the inevitable conflict between major capitalist powers and the enlargement of the Communist society of states at their expense.
However, these approaches should not be equated with US foreign policy paradigms, each with their own core group of supporters, vying to supplant its respective competitors in steering US foreign policy. Rather, they are best understood as policy options whose best mix and use at any one time was determined solely by Stalin himself, depending on the manner he perceived the international threats and opportunities he faced. By surrounding himself with “Team Stalin” -collaborators and subordinates who represented, on his instructions, one or the other of these approaches and who he “conceived… collectively as his instrument, not a consultative body”, Stalin could shift his foreign policy stance quite dramatically by discarding or replacing such personnel and still maintaining internal authority and external credibility with both his great power counter-parts and communist supporters in Europe. This flexibility of his tactical actions, corresponding to his peripheral beliefs, enabled Stalin to move from a virulent anti-Nazi stance in the mid- to late 1930s and attempts to conclude some form of alliance with the UK and France, with Litvinov as Foreign Affairs Minister, to the entirely unexpected Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, after Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov, to the war-time alliance with the USA and the UK culminating in the Teheran and Yalta Conferences and the creation of the United Nations, to finally an increasingly “hot” confrontation with his former Allies leading to the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Korean War of 1950, by which time Molotov himself had been replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky.
Although historians continue to argue about the effectiveness of Stalin’s foreign policy throughout this period and the extent to which he wanted, and planned for, a Cold War, Gaiduk best summarized a line of general agreement between most historians who have researched the archives of the former Communist countries:
“No one would argue against Stalin’s belief in and adherence to the idea of world Communist revolution. But at the same time he apparently regarded this revolution as an ultimate goal, desirable though it was, but realizable only in the distant future. He was therefore prepared to postpone its advent, even to disregard it in favor of more pressing problems. He could afford this, since he had accomplished the first stage of this revolution: he had built its bastion in the form of the Soviet Union, he had created an example of its eventual success for all other countries and peoples. Then, before and after World War II, he was apparently more preoccupied with strengthening and defending his child, guaranteeing its security and peace. He was hardly prepared to sacrifice it for attractive but nevertheless ephemeral ideas of the victory of communism all over the world. But he always kept this idea at the back of his mind and was eager to test capitalism whenever and wherever possible by political, ideological, and even military means.”
Stalin’s core belief that the moral purpose of the state he built was the subordination of individual freedom to the historic requirements of an inevitable world-wide triumph of a communist society of states structured hierarchically around the leading role of the USSR and its “vanguard”, the CPSU, is best illustrated by a brief analysis of new documents shedding light on two key events marking the transition from war-time cooperation to Cold War: the Marshall Plan and its impact on the relations between the Big Three, and Stalin’s reorganization of the Communist bloc from the 1947 Szklarska Poremba Conference to the start of the 1950 Korean War.
From Cold Peace to Cold War
A second point of agreement between historians revolves around the critical role played by the Marshall Plan as the “tipping point” of the Cold War. Stalin’s refusal to allow Poland and Czechoslovakia to participate in the 1947 Paris conference, after summoning their leaders to Moscow and dictating his terms to them –which caused Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to comment bitterly that “I went to Moscow as the Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government”, must be understood through the prism of the now famous “Novikov long telegram” of September, 1946. This document, carefully edited by Molotov and reflecting in the end the Foreign Minister’s thinking rather than just that of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, DC, Nikolai Novikov, stated that the US had abandoned its pre-war tradition of isolationism, was now ready to “assume the role of the most powerful force in resolving the fundamental questions of the postwar world” and was determined “to limit or dislodge the influence of the Soviet Union” by means of “enormous shipments of goods and importation of capital into countries hungry for consumer goods”.
As Stalin had explained to Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas in 1945 when discussing the outcome of the Second World War, “[t]his war is not as in the past, whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system… It cannot be otherwise”. The Marshall Plan, as seen through the prism of the Novikov telegram and Stalin’s core set of beliefs in the inevitability of a global conflict between the communist and capitalist camps, convinced him that the USA was reneging on the Yalta agreements and was attempting the take-over, by economic means, of his richly-deserved Eastern European chasse gardée. The inevitable result was the abandonment of any semblance of inter-Allied cooperation and an accelerated consolidation of the Communist bloc under Soviet rule –thus marking the beginning of the Cold War.
The Conference of Szklarska Poremba, in Poland, held in September 1947, was the direct result of Stalin’s latest foreign policy shift. Organized by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s heir-presumptive, then in charge of relations with Communist parties throughout Europe, it led to the creation of Cominform, the deepening of the Stalin-Tito split and, most importantly, the notion -presented in Zhdanov’s report on the international situation- that the world was henceforth divided into “two camps” where no neutral parties could exist and where each Communist party throughout Europe could only choose, in the words of Jacques Duclos, a French Communist leader, “to subdue [to Stalin’s dictates] or to break off”. As Zubok and Pleshakov clearly explain,
“Stalin’s decision to boycott the Marshall Plan meant for the Soviet Union the end of a wait-and-see attitude toward neighboring countries and, for the transitional regimes in Eastern Europe, a death sentence. Seemingly, Stalin faced a simple choice –to create a bloc using either formal diplomatic or “formal-ideological” instruments: proclaiming a Warsaw Pact in 1947 or restoring the new Comintern. He did neither. Instead, he chose another route that fit his needs remarkably well: he used the common ideology of Communist parties to organize Eastern Europe as a “security buffer” for his state.”
Zhdanov also asserted renewed control over the Western Communist parties, in particular the French and Italian Communists, by berating them for their failure to fight back against American imperialist aggression and destabilize their respective governments and countries. However, Zubok and Plekhanov miss the mark when they assert that “in 1947 the revolutionary-imperial doctrine was back”: Stalin had, in effect, never abandoned it. He was now simply shifting his foreign policy stance from one based predominantly on the Great Powers Politics approach to one relying primarily on the Global Revolutionary approach.
It is in this context of a renewed centralization of all Communist parties under the leadership of the CPSU and hence, of Stalin himself, and their succession to power in all Eastern European countries within the next year, that must be understood the dictator’s reorganization of the Far East. His initial reluctance to support Mao’s Communist revolution in China was based on his fears that Mao would not accept the leadership of the CPSU and of the “Red Boss”. After 1950, with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty and China’s entrance in the Korean War, Stalin felt confident enough in the CPSU’s primacy throughout the Communist bloc, from Berlin to Beijing and Pyongyang, to exclaim to Mao, who was raising concerns about the possible interference of the Sino-Soviet treaties with the decisions of the Yalta Conference: “To hell with that! If we make a decision to revise treaties, we must go all the way. True, we will have to struggle with the Americans, but we have already reconciled ourselves with that fact”.
The hottest phase of the Cold War was about to begin: Stalin was now prepared to fight the Americans to the very last North Korean and Chinese soldier…
Soviet Ideology and the Moral Purpose of the State
The evidence and research discussed above present us with a consistent long-term attempt on the part of the CPSU ruling elites to create an anti-hegemonic society of states diametrically opposed to the western Allies’ modern society of states, whose moral purpose of the state was not the augmentation of individuals’ purposes and potentialities but rather a subjection of individuality to a reified, utopian future social order; whose organizing principle of sovereignty was not the liberal notion of equality between nation-states but rather a neo-feudal, hierarchical paradigm of a “sovereign USSR” surrounded by “vassal” communist states; whose systemic norm of procedural justice was not legislative justice deciding like cases alike in accordance with the rule of law, but rather instrumental justice where rulings were made subject to the needs and whims of the Communist party apparatus; and where the fundamental institutions of the entire system were not contractual law and multilateralism, but rather unequal, hierarchical relations between the CPSU and national communist parties of semi-dependent states.
In 1945 the western Allies where striving to renovate the modern international society of states emerging out of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which itself had marked a purposive change from the old, absolutist European global order. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s long-term strategic goal was to establish a society of states entailing a configurative change of the constitutional structure of global order based not only on a shift in the moral purpose undergirding the system of rule from individual empowerment to individual subjection, but also a change in the organizing principle that governed the distribution of authority between states from the liberal sovereignty of equal nation-states to the neo-feudal relationship between the Soviet Union “sovereign” and satellite “liege” states. The evidence emerging out of the former Communist countries’ archives and the research it generated have built a powerful case supporting the conclusion that it is within this clash of two incompatible ideological “horizons of experience” and each side’s refusal to subordinate their own Weltanschauung to that of its adversary that can be found the true origins of the Cold War and the explanation of its early development. It is only when a generational change in the governing elites of the CPSU brought with it a collapse of the Soviet rulers’ fundamental belief in the generative structure of Soviet ideology that the Cold War could truly end.
Warrant for War
I have recently decided to focus my post-graduate studies and research around the theme of legitimate force and the force of legitimacy in the global arena, under the title “Warrant for War”.
The “Warrant for War” research project is an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise, crossing the boundaries of various fields of study, such as political theory, strategic studies, constitutional and international law, history, sociology, international relations, philosophy and even physics. It has developed out of my eclectic readings on these topics and my attempts to find linkages, similarities, and synergies between and across them.
I have set up a blog Warrant for War Blog and Warrant for War Wiki, which will hopefully assist me in my work by building up, over time, a community of interest around this topic. Anyone is more than welcome to visi, join, and contribute to these sites.
Lone Civilian and Tanks - Beijing, China 1989
“Warrant for War” hypothesizes that the emergence of a proactive, dynamic global civil society as an essentially democratic, participative grassroots network of movements, opinions and interests has become a critical factor both enabling and constraining developing legal rights of universal jurisdiction, use of emergency powers to apply military force in protecting communities at risk across national borders, and the manner in which such force is deployed and employed. This sui generis process of developing a global legitimacy requirement “from below” represents a key factor in the emergence of a global cosmopolitan citizenship heralding not the birth of a hierarchical, centralized “world state” based on the traditional European state-building model, but rather of a post-Westphalian multi-level world order where particular levels of governance will accommodate various state and non-state, territorial and non-territorial actors as well as various forms of grassroots, individual participation.
The “right of participation” of these various actors in the process of public opinion-formation and actual decision-making regarding the use of force across borders, the reasons why and the manner in which such force is deployed and wielded, and the specific actors who can legitimately exercise such powers in various circumstances will profoundly affect not only the shape and structure of a new international juridico-political order, but also the nature of the actors which will constitute this order. These trends and processes are by no means inevitable; rather, they are contingent upon the ability of today’s liberal democracies to create a “pole of attraction” possessing a critical mass sufficiently resilient in space and time to allow the progressive transformation of illiberal, totalitarian regimes and their integration in the emergent post-Westphalian international order by means of a variety of political, economic, military and ideological networks of governance expanding across their borders and their progressive transformation both from “inside” and “outside”.
Managing the transition between the current, state-centric international system structured around the key principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention tending towards a multi-polar, global balance of power system based on realist notions of interaction between territorially-defined, sovereign nation-states, and a post-Westphalian international order defined by a universal jurisdiction, cosmopolitan citizenship, and legitimate processes of multi-level governance providing effective rights of participation to various state and non-state actors will constitute the central strategic challenge of the Twenty-First Century.
This presupposes the conceptualization of more sophisticated and dynamic strategic theories than either those of a multi-polar balance of power combining both liberal democratic and illiberal totalitarian states, each pursuing their national interest in an essentially anarchic international environment, and those of a “League of Democracies” counter-posed to a set of illiberal totalitarian states in a new ideological “Cold War”. Such a transition will exhibit three simultaneous, interactive, and dynamic processes of “global social capital building” : a “bonding” process deepening the integration of liberal democracies and accelerating their transition from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian system of governance; a “bridging” process providing illiberal totalitarian states with a voice (but not a vote) in the development of the new international order, thus endowing them with increasingly high stakes in its success and attracting them to gradually move towards this new order; and a set of “evolutionary”, national processes at work within each totalitarian state generating internal legitimacy and direction to the progressive integration of illiberal totalitarian states in the emerging system of global governance.
An evolving NATO, a revitalized G-8 and a possible NAFTA-EU Free Trade Area could provide the initial institutional military, political and economic frameworks allowing the development of such “bonding” processes of global social capital formation between liberal democracies, whilst the UN and its specialized agencies, the WTO, IMF and the World Bank could provide settings for the creation of the “bridging” processes mentioned above. Together, these three processes would lead to the progressive consolidation of today’s emergent global civil society and cosmopolitan citizenship as part of an expanding, increasingly global post-Westphalian system of governance where emergency powers of intervention and use of force for protection purposes in a universal jurisdiction will be democratically legitimated, enabled and constrained.
New US Intelligence Reports Highlight Key Strategic Issues of the 21st Century
Over the past two weeks, three key reports highlighting the changing strategic nature of the 21st Century world and making recommendations to meet the most likely threats, were released in the USA.
The first report, entitled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, was released by the National Intelligence Council on October 20, 2008. In the Council’s words, “Global Trends 2025 is the fourth unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view if the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events”.
The second report, entitled Forging A New Shield, was submitted to President Bush on November 26, 2008 by the Project on National Security Reform, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization working to modernize and improve the U.S. national security system to better protect the American people against 21st century dangers. The project expects to prepare draft presidential directives and a new National Security Act to replace many of the provisions of the one enacted in 1947. The Project’s Executive Director, James R. Locher III, was interviewed by the reputed Foreign Policy magazine regarding the findings of the report, and his comments have been published on the magazine’s website and made available to the public. The 830-page report thankfully also makes available an Executive Summary for those who wish to familiarize themselves with its main arguments, conclusions and recommendations.
The third report was submitted today to the US Congress by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, and is entitled World at Risk. The Commission, set up in accordance with the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, had as mandate to assess “any and all f the nation’s activities, initiatives, and programs to prevent weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism. … [and] to provide concrete recommendations—a road map, if you will—to address these threats”.
World At Risk
The Commission chose to focus its findings on several areas where it found that the risks to the United States are increasing: the cross roads of terrorism and proliferation in the poorly governed parts of Pakistan, the prevention of biological and nuclear terrorism, and the potential erosion of international nuclear security, treaties and norms in an era of nuclear energy renaissance. Its key conclusion was that “…the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses. Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too—and in our judgment America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing.”
In order to meet these challenges in a proactive, timely and effective manner, the Commission puts forwards thirteen recommendations:
Biological Proliferation and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 1: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing domestic measures to prevent bioterrorism: (1) conduct a comprehensive review of the domestic program to secure dangerous pathogens, (2) develop a national strategy for advancing bioforensic capabilities, (3) tighten government oversight of high-containment laboratories, (4) promote a culture of security awareness in the life sciences community, and (5) enhance the nation’s capabilities for rapid response to prevent biological attacks from inflicting mass casualties.
RECOMMENDATION 2: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing measures at the international level to prevent biological weapons proliferation and terrorism: (1) press for an international conference of countries with major biotechnology industries to promote biosecurity, (2) conduct a global assessment of biosecurity risks, (3) strengthen global disease surveillance networks, and (4) propose a new action plan for achieving universal adherence to and effective national implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, for adoption at the next review conference in 2011.
Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 3: The United States should work internationally toward strengthening the nonproliferation regime, reaffirming the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons by (1) imposing a range of penalties for NPT violations and withdrawal from the NPT that shift the burden of proof to the state under review for noncompliance; (2) ensuring access to nuclear fuel, at market prices to the extent possible, for non-nuclear states that agree not to develop sensitive fuel cycle capabilities and are in full compliance with international obligations; (3) strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency, to include identifying the limitations to its safeguarding capabilities, and providing the agency with the resources and authorities needed to meet its current and expanding mandate; (4) promoting the further development and effective implementation of counterproliferation initiatives such as the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism; (5) orchestrating consensus that there will be no new states, including Iran and North Korea, possessing uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability; (6) working in concert with others to do everything possible to promote and maintain a moratorium on nuclear testing; (7) working toward a global agreement on the definition of “appropriate” and “effective” nuclear security and accounting systems as legally obligated under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540; and (8) discouraging, to the extent possible, the use of financial incentives in the promotion of civil nuclear power.
RECOMMENDATION 4: The new President should undertake a comprehensive review of cooperative nuclear security programs, and should develop a global strategy that accounts for the worldwide expansion of the threat and the restructuring of our relationship with Russia from that of donor and recipient to a cooperative partnership.
RECOMMENDATION 5: As a top priority, the next administration must stop the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. In the case of Iran, this requires the permanent cessation of all of Iran’s nuclear weapons–related efforts. In the case of North Korea, this requires the complete abandonment and dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs. If, as appears likely, the next administration seeks to stop these programs through direct diplomatic engagement with the Iranian and North Korean governments, it must do so from a position of strength, emphasizing both the benefits to both the benefits to them of abandoning their nuclear weapons programs and the enormous costs of failing to do so. Such engagement must be backed by the credible threat of direct action in the event that diplomacy fails.
Pakistan: The Intersection of Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism:
RECOMMENDATION 6: The next President and Congress should implement a comprehensive policy toward Pakistan that works with Pakistan and other countries to (1) eliminate terrorist safe havens through military, economic, and diplomatic means; (2) secure nuclear and biological materials in Pakistan; (3) counter and defeat extremist ideology; and (4) constrain a nascent nuclear arms race in Asia.
Russia and the United States:
RECOMMENDATION 7: The next U.S. administration should work with the Russian government on initiatives to jointly reduce the danger of the use of nuclear and biological weapons, including by (1) extending some of the essential verification and monitoring provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that are scheduled to expire in 2009; (2) advancing cooperation programs such as the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, and the Proliferation Security Initiative; (3) sustaining security upgrades at sensitive sites in Russia and elsewhere, while finding common ground on further reductions in stockpiles of excess highly enriched uranium; (4) jointly encouraging China, Pakistan, and India to announce a moratorium on the further production of nuclear fissile materials for nuclear weapons and to reduce existing nuclear military deployments and stockpiles; and (5) offering assistance to other nations, such as Pakistan and India, in achieving nuclear confidence-building measures similar to those that the United States and the USSR followed for most of the Cold War.
Government Organization and Culture:
RECOMMENDATION 8: The President should create a more efficient and effective policy coordination structure by designating a White House principal advisor for WMD proliferation and terrorism and restructuring the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
RECOMMENDATION 9: Congress should reform its oversight both structurally and substantively to better address intelligence, homeland security, and crosscutting 21st-century national security missions such as the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism.
RECOMMENDATION 10: Accelerate integration of effort among the counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and law enforcement communities to address WMD proliferation and terrorism issues; strengthen expertise in the nuclear and biological fields; prioritize pre-service and in-service training and retention of people with critical scientific, language, and foreign area skills; and ensure that the threat posed by biological weapons remains among the highest national intelligence priorities for collection and analysis.
RECOMMENDATION 11: The United States must build a national security workforce for the 21st century.
RECOMMENDATION 12: U.S. counterterrorism strategy must more effectively counter the ideology behind WMD terrorism. The United States should develop a more coherent and sustained strategy and capabilities for global ideological engagement to prevent future recruits, supporters, and facilitators.
RECOMMENDATION 13: The next administration must work to openly and honestly engage the American citizen, encouraging a participatory approach to meeting the challenges of the new century.
Global Trends 2025
The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 Report takes a broader view of how world developments could evolve over the next two decades. Its main conclusion is that “[t]he international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors. By 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power2 continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries. Concurrent with the shift in power among nation-states, the relative power of various nonstate actors—including businesses, tribes, religious organizations, and criminal networks—is increasing. The players are changing, but so too are the scope and breadth of transnational issues important for continued global prosperity. Aging populations in the developed world; growing energy, food, and water constraints; and worries about climate change will limit and diminish what will still be an historically unprecedented age of prosperity”.
The Council’s conclusions regarding the future trajectory of terrorism does not dispute the findings of World at Risk, but points to a possible course of action that could diminish such threats: “Terrorism, proliferation, and conflict will remain key concerns even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism is unlikely to disappear by 2025, but its appeal could diminish if economic growth continues and youth unemployment is mitigated in the Middle East. Economic opportunities for youth and greater political pluralism probably would dissuade some from joining terrorists’ ranks, but others—motivated by a variety of factors, such as a desire for revenge or to become “martyrs”—will continue to turn to violence to pursue their objectives”.
In addition, the Global Trends 2025 Report puts forward four fictionalized scenarios highlighting “new challenges that could emerge as a result of the ongoing global transformation. They present new situations, dilemmas, or predicaments that represent departures from recent developments. As a set, they do not cover all possible futures. None of these is inevitable or even necessarily likely; but, as with many other uncertainties, the scenarios are potential game-changers”:
* In A World Without the West, the new powers supplant the West as the leaders on the world stage;
* October Surprise illustrates the impact of inattention to global climate change; unexpected major impacts narrow the world’s range of options;
* In BRICs’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) Bust-Up, disputes over vital resources emerge as a source of conflict between major powers—in this case two emerging heavyweights—India and China;
* In Politics is Not Always Local, nonstate networks emerge to set the international agenda on the environment, eclipsing governments.
Forging a New Shield
Finally, the Project on National Security Reform’s Forging a New Shield finds that a new concept of national security is urgently needed in the USA: “we must learn to think differently about national security and devise new means to ensure it. The Cold War-era concept of national security has broadened as new categories of issues have pushed their way onto the national security agenda; yet others are bound to arrive in coming years, too, without neat labels or instructions for assembly and operation. This means that the operative definition of security itself must change from an essentially static concept to a dynamic one.”
The Report argues hat “…national security must be conceived as the capacity of the United States to define, defend, and advance its interests and principles in the world. The objectives of national security policy, in the world as it now is, therefore are”:
1. to maintain security from aggression against the nation by means of a national capacity to shape the strategic environment;
2. to anticipate and prevent threats;
3. to respond to attacks by defeating enemies;
4. to recover from the effects of attack; and to sustain the costs of defense To maintain security against massive societal disruption as a result of natural forces, including pandemics, natural disasters, and climate change To maintain security against the failure of major national infrastructure systems by means of building up and defending robust and resilient capacities and investing in the ability to recover from damage done to them.
In light of these objectives, the Reports identifies five key problems wih the current US national security system:
1. The system is grossly imbalanced. It supports strong departmental capabilities at the expense of integrating mechanisms;
2. Resources allocated to departments and agencies are shaped by their
3. narrowly defined core mandates rather than broader national missions.
The need for presidential integration to compensate for the systemic inability to adequately integrate or resource missions overly centralizes issue management and overburdens the White House.
4. A burdened White House cannot manage the national security system as a whole to be agile and collaborative at any time, but it is particularly vulnerable to breakdown during the protracted transition periods between administrations; and
5. Congress provides resources and conducts oversight in ways that reinforce the first four problems and make improving performance extremely difficult.
The report concludes that when “[t]aken together, the basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed, and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House from effectively controlling the system.
Consequently, the Report’s authors believe that a new National Security System must:
1. Mobilize and marshal the full panoply of the instruments of national power to achieve national security objectives;
2. Create and sustain an environment conducive to the exercise of effective leadership, optimal decision-making, and capable management ;
3. Devise a more constructive relationship between the executive branch and Congress appropriate for tackling the expanded national security agenda successfully;
4. Generate a sustainable capacity for the practice of stewardship—defined as the long-term ability to nurture the underlying assets of American power in human capital, social trust and institutional coherence—throughout all domains of American statecraft.
Finally, the Report puts forwards a series of recommendations designed to meet the objectives described above and which, if implemented, “…would constitute the most far-reaching governmental design innovation in national security since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947″, grouped under the following six rubrics:
1. adopting new approaches to national security system design focused on
national missions and outcomes, emphasizing integrated effort, collaboration, and agility;
2. focusing the Executive Office of the President on strategy and strategic
management;
3. decentralizing the modalities of policy implementation by creating interagency teams and interagency crisis task forces, even as strategy formulationis are centralized;
4. linking resources to goals through national security mission analysis and mission budgeting;
5. aligning personnel incentives, personnel preparation, and organizational culture with strategic objectives;
6. greatly improving the flow of knowledge and information; and
7. building a better executive-legislative branch partnership.
Together, these three reports constitute the most up-to-date strategic thinking of the US intelligence and strategic epistemic community regarding the threats and opportunities facing the world in general, and the USA in particular, over the next two decades. Its conclusions and recommendations will undoubtedly constitute the starting point from which President-Elect Barak Obama and his National Security Team, led by his Secretary of State nominee, Sen. Hillary Clinton, will develop the foreign policy of the United States over the next four years. As such, they constitute essential reading not only for students of strategy and international politics, but for all global citizens who intend to take a proactive part in shaping our common future over the coming years.
