An Impossible Goal for Difficult Times: Democratization and the Clinton National Security Strategy

Abstract

Abstract : Strategy is calculated relation of ends and means. Desired ends are those intended to ensure a safer, more prosperous America and that can be achieved by means available to the nation. Thus, the ultimate objective of any national security strategy is to correctly balance security against the cost of achieving it. John Lewis Gaddis restates this dilemma best: will want to do everything possible to minimize the risk of defeat, or humiliation, or embarrassment, but you will also want to minimize the costs of doing so, lest you destroy what you are trying to defend in the process. Using this rationale, the optimal national security objective is one that promotes security at an affordable cost. nation's assumptions about its domestic and international environments affect how it views and defines its security interests, objectives, and priorities. Nowhere is this observation more relevant than in the Clinton Administration's 1997 national security strategy entitled A National Security Strategy for a New Century. This document envisions today's world as a fertile field in which the seeds of democracy can be sown among nations previously within the former Soviet Union's sphere of influence or below the United States' Cold War threshold of concern. Promotion of democracy is one of our nation's core national security objectives because its authors assume that democracies are less likely to wage war to achieve their aims and that establishing them will be easier in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise. In other words, Americans will be safer in a world of democratic nations than in one in which non-democracies exist. Although this may appeal to an idealistic American public, this paper asks whether it is an optimal national security goal. For reasons that follow, the answer is no. Why isn't democratization an optimal national security goal?