Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States and Mrs. Cheney.
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, Christopher Demuth, President of the American Enterprise Institute,
and Charles Krauthammer, 2004 Irving Kristol Award recipient.
Chris DeMuth: Ladies and gentlemen, we will begin by singing America the "My Country,
'Tis of Thee, God Save the Queen" version.
I know that everyone present knows the word by heart, but for those who would like a refresher,
the words are printed in the middle of your program.
We will be led by my AEI colleagues, Alexandra Obraskan [SP], Osea Dosova, and Heather Dresser,
please.
My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing; Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride, From ev'ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!
Our fathers' God to Thee, Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright, With freedom's holy light,
Protect us by Thy might, Great God our King.
Chris DeMuth: Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated.
Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, colleagues and distinguished guests, welcome to the annual
dinner of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.This is our largest
annual gathering since Ronald Reagan gave his final major address in Washington in December
of 1988.
I'm deeply grateful to our many, generous sponsors, especially our friends, advisor
and members of our dinner committee.
George Shultz was once asked, "What is the most important qualification for a senior
position in government?"
He replied, "A high tolerance for ambiguity."
Presidents and Cabinet Secretaries only get to make hard calls, the easy calls are made
by others.
Many decisions have good arguments on both sides, but the really hard ones are those
that combine very large stakes with very large uncertainties.
They call for intelligence of the larger and more profound kind, and a determination not
to lose a kingdom for a shoe.
If we were to form a commission of inquiry into every important Oval Office decision
made without the luxury of waiting for more and better information, there would be no
more worries about job creation in the service sector.
And in a fractious democracy such as ours, the hard decisions are endlessly contested,
in public debate, in competition among the three branches of government, and even within
the Executive Branch itself.
For us, the biggest decisions are not executive calls at all, but rather a process of continuous
advocacy, compromise, and adaptation.
During the past 29 months, America and the Free World have entered a new political epoch,
whose defining features are, precisely, terribly large risks and terribly large uncertainties,
especially concerning the operations of our enemies.
Our political leaders have made a series of momentous decisions and have done so with
great resolution.
Their resolution is all the more impressive when one considers that the deficiencies of
information, and of government institutions designed for an earlier era, are better known
to them than to anyone else.
Now their decisions and their resolution are being tested in the cauldron of democratic
politics.
Tolerance for ambiguity is not a predominant feature of partisan campaigning.
But elections themselves have clarified and fortified our foreign policies to an impressive
degree in the past.
In the Cold War, from the Truman Doctrine to the Reagan Doctrine, our enemies were demonstrating
their WMDs out in the open, bragging about how they would use them against us, routinely
invading and subjugating other nations, and slaughtering civilians by the millions.
Still, fashioning and sustaining a political consensus was very hard, and contested from
start to finish.
Many Americans sincerely believed, and argued vehemently, that the root of the world's problems
was America itself.
But we prevailed.
And we prevailed not in spite of, but because of the vigor of our democratic practices and
the sturdiness of popular understanding.
Can we do it again, in circumstances more shrouded and insidious?
Today, despite stupendous initial victories, we are in the midst of strenuous and necessary
debates over military and political strategy, the effectiveness of our intelligence and
diplomatic institutions, and the maintenance of fiscal discipline and personal and economic
freedom at home.
But if we stand at the beginning of another 50-year epoch, a "generational commitment"
as Condoleezza Rice puts it, then we are still just getting started, still at the moment
of creation of new policies and new institutions for facing the tasks and perils ahead.
That the two men who are speaking to us this evening have been present at the creation
is another great stroke of American fortune.
One, the recipient of AEI's Irving Kristol Award for 2004, is a man of thinking and writing.
The other, a former AEI senior fellow and vice chairman of our Board, now Vice President
of the United States, is a man of thinking and action.
Charles Krauthammer, his great contribution has been to see through fogs of uncertainty
in times of upheaval.
He has grasped the essentials of new problems while others remained confused by incidentals.
More than once, he has provided us with an intellectual architecture that shows that
what we already know provides a sturdy foundation for action.
Charles is also an avid amateur chess player.
He is a founding member, along with AEI's Charles Murray, of one of Washington's most
exclusive secret societies, the Pariah Chess Club.
His Irving Kristol Award consists of this exquisite John Jack's Stan and Chess set and
hand-crafted board.
Our media, which can take the silliest people and ideas seriously, often find truly serious
men and women a bafflement.
It is very funny to read the latest line on Dick Cheney, that this open and engaging man,
who has expressed himself on every manner of policy question in 30 years at the center
of American politics, who has been Minority Whip of the House of Representatives, who
has served in the senior ranks of four administrations, who has become the activist Vice President
par excellence, is just now emerging from obscurity, getting around town, attending
coming-out parties, and plunging into the thick of public debate.
At AEI, we admire people who think before they speak, who choose their words carefully,
and who understand when the time for research is over and the time for decision has arrived.
We are very honored that the vice president would continue to attend our councils while
on extended leave-of-absence through 2009 or 2017.
Tonight he has graciously agreed to introduce our Irving Kristol Lecturer.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States.
Vice President Cheney: Thank you.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you, Chris.
And it's a pleasure tonight to join all of you in honoring Charles Krauthammer, a man
I admire very much, and am proud to call a friend.
The Irving Kristol Award is named for one great American, and tonight we bestow it on
another.
Lynne and I are pleased, as well, to be in the company of so many other friends and colleagues,
starting with Chris DeMuth, who does an absolutely superb job as President of AEI.
Being here brings to mind my own days affiliated with AEI, which stretch back some 30 years,
as an office holder, a freshman congressman, an out-of-work politician, a member of the
Board of Trustees, and a corporate official, who didn't appreciate how valuable the experience
was till I was asked to contribute financially for the privilege of being part of it.
But it has been a very, very important part of our lives, for me and for Lynne, and a
very important part of our intellectual learning and development during our years in Washington.
I spent a time at AEI when I was a scholar, a time when I had an office, a small staff,
and not much in the way of actual responsibility.
It turned out to be a lot like the vice presidency.
Lynne and I are truly grateful for our many years of association with the American Enterprise
Institute.
AEI has developed a reputation, well-deserved, for disciplined scholarship, intellectual
integrity, and fresh insight into public policy.
And AEI continues to earn that reputation every year with research and writing of high
standards and ever-increasing influence.
Few at AEI are more influential than the chairman of our Board of Academic Advisers, Professor
James Q. Wilson, who, last July, received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush.
I've known Jim for a number of years, I've respected his work ever since I was a graduate
student, in the days when Lynne and I were both working on our PhDs.
Lynne actually went on to earn her PhD in British literature.
I haven't quite settled on a topic for my dissertation yet.
For me, an expected career in academic life was overtaken by a series of opportunities
in government.
And so, I have spent much of the last three-and-a-half decades in and around this city.
Here, where our national debates are centered, you get used to the shifting attention and
the passing enthusiasms that characterize so much of our political commentary.
You learn to take it all in, and then to select out the well-considered judgments of a serious
thinker.
You begin to listen through the chorus in search of that one clear note.
And so often, that clear note is the commentary of Charles Krauthammer.
This most respected of writers is also a distinguished medical doctor who spent years in practice
as a noted psychiatrist.
He first came to Washington in the 1970s, and soon found himself working at the White
House for one of my predecessors.
I now wish I had paid more attention at the time to the speeches of Walter Mondale, because
I'm sure they were absolutely first rate.
By the early 1980s, Charles's talent had been recognized by editors and by readers in Washington
and well beyond.
And the most impressive aspect of his work is the sustained level of quality over a period
of more than 20 years.
This is not a columnist who merely fills space and meets deadlines.
Charles Krauthammer always writes with care.
In his columns and essays, there is always a powerful line of reasoning, and behind it
the workings of a superior intellect.
When you read his words, you know you are dealing with a serious person, who assumes
the same of you.
You see something else, as well, in a Krauthammer column.
Whatever the subject at hand, Charles gives the reader evidence and argument, never just
sentiment and the conventional wisdom.
His great intelligence is guided by principle and an understanding of the world as it is.
These qualities produce special insights into the very areas where we need them most, from
the new powers mankind has assumed in science, to the new dangers confronting America and
other free nations.
A consistent theme in Charles's writings is his belief in human freedom, and his abhorrence
for violence and tyranny.
Since September 11th, Charles has written compellingly on the urgent duty of free nations
to defeat the terrorists, and hold to account any regime that supports or arms them.
This war on terror has in many ways brought out the finest qualities of the American people.
And the complexities of this era have certainly brought out the finest attributes of this
writer, his wisdom, his deep moral sensibility, and his conviction that freedom is the right
of all mankind and must be defended.
The citation for the Irving Kristol Award for 2004 reads as follows:
To Charles Krauthammer:
Fearless journalist, wise analyst, and militant democrat, who has shown that America's interests
and ideals are indivisible, and that the promotion of freedom is hard-headed realism.
I'm very pleased that Charles's wife, Robyn, and their son, Daniel, are here to witness
the presentation of this award, and to see the respect and affection we all feel for
its recipient.
It is my privilege to introduce the great man we honor tonight, Dr. Charles Krauthammer.
Dr. Krauthammer: Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
Thank you for those very kind words.
I'm honored by your presence here, especially during duck hunting season.
And as a citizen, I wanna thank you not only for your leadership and your wisdom during
these extraordinary times, but for your courage.
If Hamlet had borne half the slings and arrows you have, it would have been a very short
play.
Seeing my checker past recalled in the program, I'm struck by how many places I have fled,
the democratic party, Canada and psychiatry, the trifecta.
The reason I'm here ladies and gentlemen, is that I have nowhere left to go.
I wanna thank Chris DeMuth, Jim Wilson and the AEI Counsel for thinking otherwise and
for bestowing upon me this great honor, particularly one that carries the name of my dear and revered
friend, Irving Kristol.
My subject tonight, is "American Foreign Policy."
Americans have healthy aversion to foreign policy.
It stems from a sense of thrift.
Who needs it?
We're protected by two great oceans.
We have this continent practically to ourselves.
And we share it with only two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people
seem intent upon moving in with us.
It took three giants of the 20th Century to drag us into its great battles, Wilson into
World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War.
And then it ended with one of the great anticlimaxes in history.
Without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet
Union simply gave up and disappeared.
It was the end of everything, the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European
wars.
It was the end of e Russian Empire, an empire was grooved by swallowing the equivalent of
a Belgium every year for 200 years.
Given how Brussels has behaved recently, overall, not a bud idea.
But the end of everything was also a beginning.
On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly
new, a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with
decisive reach in every corner of the globe.This is a staggering new development in human history,
not seen since the fall of Rome.
It is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it.
Our first reaction, the 1990s, was utter confusion.
The next reaction was awe.
When Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America
did in the Afghan war, a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar
power at a distance of 8,000 miles.
He not only recanted, he stood in wonder, "Nothing has ever existed like this disparity
of power," he wrote, "Nothing.
No other nation comes close.
Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in its reach.
The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia,
and a larger one in China.
There is, therefore, no comparison."
Even Rome is no model for what America is today.
First, because we do not have the imperial culture of Rome.
We are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens.
And this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the
world, acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain's.
And it was not just absent-mindedness, it was sheer inadvertence.
We got here because of Europe's suicide in the world wars of the 20th century, and then
the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and
economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its
sleep, leaving us with global dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical
empires of modern times, in that we do not hunger for territory.
The use of the word "empire" in the American context is ridiculous.
It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instincts upon arriving on anyone's
soil is to demand an exit strategy.
I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they
were not looking for exit strategies.
They were looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence, "I think you are another
of these desert-loving English.
The English have a great hunger for desolate places."
Indeed, for five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans
and new continents.
Americans do not.
We like it here.
We like our McDonald's.
We like our football.
We like our rock-and-roll.
And until 10 days ago, we liked our half-time shows.
We've got the Grand Canyon and Graceland.
We've got Silicon Valley and South Beach.
We've got everything.
And if that's not enough, we've got the Vegas, which is a facsimile of everything.
What could we possibly need anywhere else?
We don't like exotic climates.
We don't like exotic languages.
All those declensions and moods, we don't even know what a mood is.
We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese, or Indian, or Italian,
we go to the food court.
We don't send the Marines for takeout.
That's because we are not an imperial power.
We are a commercial republic.
We don't take food, we trade for it, which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly,
a hybrid, a commercial republic with overwhelming global power.
A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian
of the international system.
The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia, Arab
and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
That is who we are.
That is where we are.
And now the question is: What do we do?
What is a unipolar power to do?
The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat.
This is known as isolationism.
Of all the foreign policy schools in America, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising
in the country protected by two great oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the
old world.
We were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
Today, however, isolationism is an ideology of fear.
Fear of trade.
Fear of immigrants.
Fear of the Other.
Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration, and withdraw from our military and strategic
commitments around the world.
Even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so
obviously an act of self-defense, only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose
that.
But anything beyond that, isolationists oppose.
They are for a radical retrenchment of American power for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress
America.
Isolationism is an important school of thought historically, but not today.
Not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously
inappropriate to the world of today, a world of export-driven economies, of massive population
flows, and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology
and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between "over there" and "over here."
Classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete, it is politically bankrupt as well.
Four years ago, its most public advocate, Pat Buchanan, ran for president of the United
States, and carried Palm Beach, by accident.
Classic isolationism is moribund.
Who then rules America?
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism.
Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of
the foreign policy elite.
It has a peculiar history.
It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson's utopianism, Harry Truman's anticommunism,
and John Kennedy's militant universalism.
But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence
and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman's and Kennedy's role in containing communism,
but what they prefer to forget is that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used
"cold warrior" as an epithet.
In the early 1980s, they gave us the freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament
in the face of Soviet nuclear advances.
Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan's "illegal
war in Central America."
And oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded
in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War.
But that passivity outlived the Cold War.
When Kuwait was invaded and the question was, "Should the United States go to war to prevent
the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands?"
The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying no.
The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly, two to one in the House, more than four to one
in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years
later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyper-interventionist.
It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading
Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How do you explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti
and Balkan hawks?
The crucial and obvious difference is this, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian
ventures, fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest.
And not only humanitarian intervention, disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest
is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force.
The history of the '90s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use
of force.
They do not.
They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest, I do not mean simple self-defense.
Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan.
I'm talking about national interest as defined by a great power, shaping the international
environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic
goods.
Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy
and unsupportable.
It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect,
a form of grand national selfishness.
Hence Kuwait, no.
Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which
expressed itself in a mania for treaties.
The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons,
chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, antiballistic missiles, etc.
Why?
No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties
were anything more than transparently useless.
Senator Joe Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents
admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would "provide us with a valuable
tool", the "moral suasion of the entire international community."
Moral suasion?
The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons.
Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass
destruction?
Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections?
It was the suasion of the bayonet.
It was the ignominious fall of Saddam and the desire of interested spectators not to
be next on the list.
Moral suasion is a farce.
Why then this obsession with protocols, legalisms UN resolutions?
Its obvious net effect and after all is to temper American power and reduce American
freedom of action by making it dependent on constricted by serving into the will and interest
of other nations.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise, to tie down Gulliver
with a thousand strings, to domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national
interest on the planet, ours.
Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties?
North Korea?
Today, multilateralism remains the overriding theme of liberal internationalism.
When in power in the '90s, multilateralism expressed itself as a mania for treaties.
When out of power in this decade, it manifests itself in the slavish pursuit of "international
legitimacy," and opposition to any American action undertaken without universal foreign
blessing, which is why the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq is so peculiarly one of
process and not of policy.
The problem was that we did not have the permission of the UN.
We did not have a large enough coalition; we did not have a second Security Council
resolution.
Kofi Annan was unhappy and the French were cross.
The Democratic presidential candidates all say we should have internationalized the conflict,
brought in the UN, enlisted the allies, for two reasons, they say, assistance and legitimacy.
First, they say, we could have used these other countries to help us in the reconstruction.
This is rich.
Everyone would like to have more help in reconstruction.
It would have been lovely to have the Germans and the French in Baghdad.
So Germans the ca'do the policing, the French ca'do the catering.
But the question is moot, and the argument is cynical.
France and Germany made it absolutely clear that they would never support the overthrow
of Saddam.
So, accommodating them was not a way to get them into the reconstruction, it was a way
to ensure that there would never be any reconstruction, because Saddam would still be in power.
Of course, it would be nice if we had more allies rather than less.
It would also be nice to be able to fly.
But when some nations are not with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition
is not a way to broaden it, it's a way to abolish it.
At which point, liberal internationalists switch gears and appeal to legitimacy?
On the grounds that multilateral action has a higher moral standing.
I have always found that line of argument utterly incomprehensible.
By what possible moral calculus does U.S. intervention to liberate 25 million people
forfeit moral legitimacy because it lacks the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen
Square or the cynics of the Quai d'Orsay?
Which is why it is hard to take these arguments at face value.
Look, we know why liberal internationalists demanded UN sanction for the war in Iraq.
It was a way to stop the war.
It was the Gulliver effect.
Call a committee meeting of countries with hostile or contrary interests, i.e., the Security
Council, and you have guaranteed yourself another 12 years of inaction.
Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by
attaching themselves to stronger ones.
But multilateralism imposed on great powers, particularly on a unipolar power, is intended
to restrain that power, which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist.
But why should America be?
Why, in the end, does liberal internationalism want to tie down Gulliver, to blunt the pursuit
of American national interests by making it subordinate to a myriad of other interests?
In the immediate post-Vietnam era, this aversion to national interest might have been attributed
to self-doubt and self-loathing.
I don't know.
I leave that question to a trained psychiatrist.
What I do know is that today it is a mistake to see liberal foreign policy as deriving
from anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism or a late efflorescence of '60s radicalism.
On the contrary, the liberal aversion to national interest stems from an idealism, a larger
vision of country, a vision of some ambition and nobility, the vision of a true international
community.
And that is, to transmute the international system from the Hobbesian universe into a
Lockean universe, to turn the state of nature into a norm-driven community, to turn the
law of the jungle into the rule of law of treaties and contracts and UN resolutions.
In short, to remake the international system in the image of domestic society.
And to create such a true international community, you have to temper, transcend, and, in the
end, abolish the very idea of state power and national interest.
Hence the antipathy to American hegemony and American power.
If you are going to break the international arena to the mold of domestic society, you
have to domesticate its single most powerful actor.
You have to abolish American dominance, not only as an affront to fairness, but also as
the greatest obstacle on the whole planet to a democratized international system where
all live under self-governing international institutions and self-reenforcing international
norms.
This vision is all very nice, all very noble, and all very crazy.
And it brings us to the third great foreign policy school, realism.
The realist looks at this great liberal project and sees a hopeless illusion.
Because turning the Hobbesian world that has existed since long before the Peloponnesian
Wars into a Lockean world, turning a jungle into a subdivision of the suburb, requires
a revolution in human nature.
Not just an set of new institutions, but a revolution in human nature.
And realists do not believe in revolutions of human nature, much less stake their future,
and the future of their countries upon them.
Realism recognizes the fundamental fallacy in the whole idea of the international system
being modeled on domestic society.
First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central authority wielding a
monopoly of power and enforcing norms.
In the international arena, there is no such thing.
Domestic society may look like a place of self-regulating norms, but if somebody breaks
into your house, you call 911, and the police arrive with guns drawn.
That's not exactly self-enforcement.
That's law enforcement.
Second, domestic society rests on the shared goodwill, civility and common values of its
individual members.
What values are shared by, say, Britain, Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe-all nominal members of
this fiction we call the "international community?"
Of course, you can have smaller communities of shared interests-NAFTA, ANZUS, the European
Union.
But the European conceit that relations with all nations, regardless of ideology, regardless
of culture, regardless even of open hostility, should be transacted on the EU model of suasion,
and norms, and negotiations, and solemn contractual agreements is an illusion.
A fisheries treaty with Canada is something real.
An agreed framework on plutonium processing with the likes of North Korea is not worth
the paper it is written on.
The realist believes in the definition of peace offered in "The Devil's Dictionary"
by Ambrose Bierce, "Peace, noun.
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting."
Hence, the realist axiom, the international community is a fiction.
It is not a community, it is a cacophony of straining ambitions, disparate values and
contending power.
What does hold the international system together?
What keeps it from degenerating into total anarchy?
Not the phony security of treaties, not the best of goodwill among the nicer nations.
In the unipolar world we inhabit, what stability we do enjoy today is owed to the overwhelming
power and deterrent threat of the United States.
If someone invades your house, you call the cops.
Who do you dial if someone invades your country?
You dial Washington.
In the unipolar world, the closest thing to a centralized authority, to an enforcer of
norms, is America, American power.
And ironically, American power is precisely what liberal internationalism wants to constrain
and tie down and subsume in pursuit of some brave new Lockean world.
Realists don't live just in America.
I found one in Finland.
During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts,
interestingly enough, was Finland.
The Finnish Prime Minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban.
And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors.
To which he responded tartly that this was a very convenient pose for the other Nordic
countries, after all, Finland is their land mine.
That one usually takes about five seconds.
It helps to have a map.
Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia.
America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.
Where would South Korea be without America and its land mines along the DMZ?
Where would Europe, with its cozy arrogant community be without America having saved
it from the Soviet colossus?
Where would the Middle East be had American power not stopped the Saddam in 1991?
The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and
in a unipolar world, American power, wielded, if necessary, unilaterally, and if necessary,
preemptively.
Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of wielding it, preemption
and unilateralism, the focus of unrelenting criticism.
The doctrine of preemption, in particular, has been widely attacked for violating international
norms.
What international norm?
The one under which in 1981, Israel was universally condemned, even the Reagan administration
joined in the condemnation at the Security Council, for preemptively destroying Osirak
reactor.
Does anyone today doubt that it was the right thing to do, both strategically and morally?
In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option
of preemption is especially necessary.
In the bipolar world of the Cold War, with a stable non-suicidal adversary, deterrence
could work.
Deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven.
It does not work against undeterrables.
And it does not work against undetectables.
Non-suicidal enemy regimes that might attack through clandestine means, a suitcase nuke
or anonymously delivered anthrax.
Against both undeterrables and undetectables, preemption is the only possible strategy.
If anything, the doctrine of preemption against openly hostile states pursuing weapons of
mass destruction is an improvement on classical deterrence.
Traditionally, we deterred the use of weapons of mass destruction by the threat of retaliation
after we'd been attacked, and that's too late.
The point of preemption is to deter the very acquisition of weapons of mass destruction
in the first place.
Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the very fact
that the United States overthrew a hostile regime that had repeatedly refused to come
clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect.
We are safer today not just because Saddam is gone, but because Libya and Iran and others
contemplating, tracking with Weapons of Mass Destruction, have, for the first time, seen
that it carries a cost, a very high cost.
Yes, of course, imperfect intelligence makes preemption problematic.
But that is not an objection on principle, it is an objection in practice.
Indeed, the objection concedes the principle.
We need good intelligence.
But we remain defenseless if we abjure the option of preemption.
The other great objection to the way American unipolar power has been wielded is its unilateralism.
I would dispute how unilateralist we have been, not nearly enough for my taste, but
no matter.
Look, of course, one acts in concert with others if possible.
It is nice when others join us in the breach.
No one seeks to be unilateral.
Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will
of others.
Irving Kristol once explained that he preferred the Organization of American States to the
UN.
In the OAS, you see, we can be voted down in only three languages, thereby saving interpreters'
fees.
Of course, you build coalitions when possible.
We garnered a coalition of the willing for Iraq which included substantial allies like
Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and much of Eastern Europe.
France and Germany made clear from the beginning that they would never join in the overthrow
of Saddam.
Therefore the choice was not a wide coalition versus a narrow one, but a narrow coalition
versus none.
There were serious arguments against the war in Iraq, but the fact that France did not
approve was not one of them.
Realists choose not to be Gulliver.
In an international system with no sovereign, no police, no protection, where power is the
ultimate arbiter and history has bequeathed us unprecedented power, we should preserve
that power and our freedom of action to use it.
But here we come up against the limits of realism.
You cannot live by power alone.
Realism is an antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 90s, but realism can only take you
so far.
Its basic problem lies in its definition of national interest as classically offered by
its great theorist, Hans Morgenthau, interest defined as power.
Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations, what drives the foreign policy, is the will
to power, to keep it and expand it.
For most Americans, will to power might be a correct description of the world of what
motivates other countries, but it cannot be a prescription for America.
It cannot be our purpose.
America cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone.
Our foreign policy must be driven by something beyond power.
And unless conservatives present ideals to challenge the liberal ideal of an international
community, they will lose the debate, which is why among American conservatives, another
more idealistic school has arisen that sees America's national interest as an expression
of its values.
It is this fourth school that has guided foreign policy in this decade.
This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and invidiously called neoconservatism,
but that is a very odd name for a school whose major proponents in the world today are George
W. Bush and Tony Blair.
If they are neoconservatives, then I'm a liberal.
There's nothing neo about Bush, and there's nothing con about Blair.
Yet they are the principal proponents today of what might be called democratic globalism,
a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that
identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called "the success of liberty."
As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November, "The United States
and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple
pursuit of interest.
We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings."
Beyond power, beyond interest, beyond interest defined as power.
This is the credo of democratic globalism, which explains its political appeal.
America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, or race, but on a proposition, to which
its sacred honor has been pledged for 200 years.
This American exceptionalism explains why non-Americans find this foreign policy so
difficult to credit, why Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his
country, and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign policy hopelessly
and irritatingly moralistic.
Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will
to freedom.
And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes
from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1960, and Reagan's evil empire
speech of 1983.
They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle
between freedom and unfreedom, and, yes, good and evil.
Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily attacked by realists like Hans Morgenthau
and George Kennan, and Reagan attacked by the entire foreign policy establishment for
the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay.
That was then.
Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different
enemy, not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious.
Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naively and crudely casting this struggle
as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil.
Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan
and Iraq, the two major wars of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair's moral
claims the decided advantage of being obviously true.
Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous.
Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine.
I dare say, many conservatives in particular.
When Blair declares in his address to Congress, "The spread of freedom is our last line of
defense and our first line of attack," they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively
utopian foreign policy.
In short, they see Woodrow Wilson.
Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fighting words.
Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian.
But it ain't Wilsonian.
Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international
institutions.
He could be forgiven for that.
In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless these international institutions
would turn out to be.
Eight decades of bitter experience later, with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human
Rights, there is no way not to know.
Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian.
Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism's insights about the centrality of
power.
Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms
of liberal internationalism.
Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism.
What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means,
an indispensable means for securing American interests.
The reason is simple.
Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their
neighbors, and more inclined to peace.
Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing
bad guys over the head.
But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits.
At some point, you have to implant something, something organic.
And that something is democracy.
But where?
The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to
human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere.
It must learn to say no.
And indeed, it does say no.
But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian
rulers in places like Pakistan and, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy,
which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
And I propose a single criteria, where to intervene?
Where to bring democracy?
Where to nation-build?
Where it counts?
Call it democratic realism.
And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure
in places where there is a strategic necessity, meaning, a place central to the larger war
against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.
Where does it count?
Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted.
Why?
Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in mid-century, fascism,
and then were turned into bulwarks against the new, next great threat, the Soviet Union
and Soviet communism.
Where does it count today?
Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive
effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the
Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us both in its secular and religious forms
for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.
Establishing civilized, decent, non-belligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq
and ultimately their key neighbors would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan in
the 40s, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.
Yes, it may be a bridge too far.
Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transmute an alien culture
because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom.
And they may be right, but how do they know in advance?
Half a century ago, we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to democracy
of Confucian culture.
That proved stunningly wrong.
Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?
Yes, the undertaking as in Germany and Japan is enormous, ambitious, arrogant, and it may
not succeed.
But we cannot afford not to try.
There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster
behind 9/11.
It was not Osama bin Laden, it's the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance,
and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic ,oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no
legitimacy into murderous anti-Americanism.
It's not one man, it is a condition.
It will be nice to find that man and to hang him, but that's the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement
model of fighting terror that we tried for 20 years and that gave us 9/11.
This is war, and in war, arresting murderers is nice.
But you win by taking territory and leaving something behind.
We are the unipolar power, and what do we do?
In August, 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians
naming 20 still unsolved mathematical problems bequeathed by the 19th Century to the 20th.
Only three remained by the way, but the soup is getting cold, so that's for another night.
Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems bequeathed to the 20th century, one
would have stood out above all, the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European
state system.
Similarly today, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can see clearly the two great geopolitical
challenges on the horizon, the inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse
of Europe, both of which will irrevocably alter the equilibrium of the international
system.
But these problems come later.
They are for mid-century.
They are for the young people here tonight.
And we won't even get to these problems unless we first deal with our problem.
And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism.
Nine-eleven felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem
with a new face.
Nine-eleven felt like the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history,
the history of radical ideologies and existential enemies.
The anomaly is not the world of today.
The anomaly was the '90s, our holiday from history.
It felt like peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality.
Nine-eleven woke us up.
It startled us into thinking that everything was new.
It's not.
What is new is what happened not on 9/11 but 10 years earlier, on December 26, 1991, the
emergence of the United States as the world's unipolar power.
What is unique is our advantage in this new struggle, an advantage we did not have during
the struggles of the 20th Century.
The question for our time is how to press this advantage, how to exploit our unipolar
power, how to deploy it to win the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.
What is the unipolar power to do?
Four schools, four answers.
The isolationists want simply to ignore unipolarity, pull up the drawbridge, and defend Fortress
America.
Alas, the fortress has no moat, not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic
missile, and as for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11.
Then there are the liberal internationalists.
They like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don't
like it.
They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an expression
of national selfishness.
And they don't just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece
by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes
not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.
And then there is realism, which has the clearest understanding of the new unipolarity and its
uses, unilateral and preemptive if necessary.
But in the end, realism fails, because it offers no vision.
It is all means and no ends.
It cannot adequately define our mission.
Hence, the fourth school, democratic globalism.
It has, in this decade, rallied the American people to a struggle over values.
It seeks to vindicate the American idea by making the spread of democracy, the success
of liberty, the ends and means of American foreign policy.
I support that.
I applaud that.
But I believe it must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic
globalism to a democratic realism.
It must be targeted, focused and limited.
We are the friends of all, but we come ashore only where it really counts.
And where it counts today is the Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.
My friends, in October 1962, for 13 days, we came to the edge of the abyss.
Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we drew back.
On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy
that does not draw back.
This time with an enemy that knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless.
But there is a second difference between now and then, the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled,
not just today but ever, and that evens the odds.
The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control, but the use of our power
is within our control.
And if that power is used, constrained not by illusions and fictions, but only by the
limits of our mission, which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism,
we can and we will prevail.
Thank you, very much.
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