ABSTRACT
Writing with his usual prescience in 1962 at the height of the cold war, Arnold Wolfers cautioned that there were serious problems with any concept of “national security” whose authors failed to acknowledge its nature as “an ambiguous symbol”. (Wolfers 1962: Chapter 10). Writing decades later after the end of the cold war, but before the 9/11 attacks, Richard Betts warned of similar problems in the leading American journal, International Security. Asking whether “strategy” was still an “illusion”, he argued that “strategy fails when the chosen means prove insufficient to the ends.” He wrote that the “limiting the range of ends” could be as important as limiting the range of means”(Betts 2000). Now, as US policymakers and theorists struggle to incorporate “the war on terror” into existing strategic rationales or try to devise newer concepts of security that make sense either domestically or internationally, how useful are these caveats? Are concepts of US national security in the twenty-first century fated to be ambig-
uous? Is strategy still an “illusion”? If so, what are the consequences? Could a return to geostrategic thinking from the cold war, as George Kennan articulated, make a comeback? Do either the much discussed “selective engagement” or “off-shore balancing” avoid these traps? Placing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in this longer view offers sobering insights
into the limits of both theory and practice. Surveying the period from 2001 to 2009 is a useful way of answering the two questions posed in this chapter’s subtitle. Just as most US IR theorists and policymakers missed the end of cold war in the years leading up to 1989, so, too, they missed the significance of terrorism as a challenge to American national security interests in the run-up to 9/11. Many theorists and policymakers also were slow to grasp the deleterious implications of linking the war in Iraq to the ambiguous challenge of a generalized war on terror. Now as the Bush administration has ended, the legacy of these errors is becoming clearer. To give but one example, the unresolved conflict between Iran and the USA demonstrates the mismatch of goals and means that Wolfers, Kennan and Betts observed. Other illustrations abound. In world politics, every day is not a new tomorrow.
Legacies from one administration to another persist. Unanswered questions and unresolved conflicts afflict Washington, regardless of political party. Any search for “new directions” must acknowledge this basic fact. So it is important to analyze the main lines of argument the Bush administration
used to legitimate its policies on both the war on terror and the second Iraq war. For
they were to be the building blocks of new directions in 2001. Now, eight years later, were they part of a coherent strategic vision? Or just officials making it up as they went along? In either case, what explains the failure of mainstream theorists to challenge more forcefully the Bush administration’s claims of linkage between a second Iraq war, unfinished business in Iran and the self-proclaimed war on terror? Given these realities, what might be the outlines of a non-doctrinal post-Bush/Cheney, post-Iraq strategy for the USA?
