The fundamentals of American security

Abstract

0 ur best journals and worst statesmen sound the same theme. A new era has dawned, and the lessons of past decades, not to mention centuries, no longer pertain. America’s very national interests, and the means to advance them, must therefore be divined de nova, if not ex nihilo, in a quarrelsome cacophony of internationalists, economic nationalists, unilateralists, multilateralists, and neo-isolationists. On the one hand, we read that for the frost time in over fifty years, no serious threat to U.S. security exists. On the other, we read that every global trend poses a long-term threat, be it disease and famine, ecological damage, drugs, pollution, ethnic strife, religious zealotry, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or economic competition. Nowhere in the planning documents of the secretary of defense or Joint Chiefs of Staff do we read about potential threats from the former Soviet Union or China. No foundation supports research on potential great power conflicts; indeed, foundations seem to have lost interest in strategic affairs altogether. It seems that the Clinton administration and the foreign policy community in the United States are content to wonder only how much and how quickly the ranks of market democracy will be enlarges as a matter of historical inevitability, not how they might be defended in need. The real world, as always, suggests contrary prognostications. To be sure, it is safer now that no Politburo controls a four-million-man military armed with more modem weaponry than the rest of the world combined. Yet, we have no assurance that warlike tendencies will not recapture the former Soviet empire, no assurance that China will not succumb to territorial ambitions as its strength grows, and (if Bosnia is any indication) we have every assurance that Europe is less likely, not more, to stand up to a future Russian bid to intimidate. And what of ourselves? As our military shrinks, as we look increasingly inward, as the blunders of the current and former administrations sour the American people on foreign engagements, what is the chance that the United States will act with prescience and determination to nip future threats in the bud? And if we do not, in the face of new Russian or Chinese challenges, what will become