US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era

Restraint versus Assertiveness From George H. W. Bush To Barack Obama

T. Onea

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137359353
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why has the US proven unable to enact a foreign policy of restraint in the post-Cold War era? For all but a brief period in the 1990s, US foreign policy is marked by an assertive appearance despite relative hegemony. This book examines the causes and impact of US foreign policy - measuring its successes, pitfalls, and what the future has in store.

1

INTRODUCTION

“We are going to do a terrible thing to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”¹ This 1988 statement by Georgi Arbatov, a top Soviet foreign policy adviser, showcases the considerable strategic difficulties met by the United States once it was left without a superpower rival to compete against. Deploring the demise of an enemy irreducibly committed to the obliteration of your way of life may impress observers as making little sense. Nonetheless, the presence of an enemy equips a state with a grand strategy connecting means to objectives in its international undertakings.² Despite its many facets and critics, containment had provided for more than four decades a straightforward purpose in the more predictable, even if more dangerous, world of the Cold War. But once the Soviet Union conceded defeat, soon to be followed by its disintegration, the United States was left without a successor strategy, and, consequently, with no clear road map to follow.

Hence, the post–Cold War US foreign policy is frequently described as a fruitless quest for a grand strategy to replace containment.³ For many analysts, US foreign policy during George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s time in office constitutes an incoherent and often ungainly attempt to implement at once various mutually contradictory strategic options.⁴ Following September 11, this seeming embarrassment of choice was understood to have been replaced by clarity of purpose in the so-called “Bush revolution,” defined by the preservation of US military supremacy, unilateralism, and preventive war. But the Bush revolution ended abruptly as well, even before the political exit of its originator, plagued by a worsening economy and insurgency in Iraq, leaving the United States once again without a strategic rudder in the murky waters of world politics. This apparent uncertainty continues under the Obama administration.⁵

Yet, despite this lack of a clear strategy, the United States has shown a steady propensity in the last 20 years for strategies favoring assertiveness over restraint, even though restraint seemed not only feasible, but also more advantageous. Therefore, the question under investigation consists in why the United States chose assertiveness over restraint as the cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Restraint refers to the infrequent and slight use of the military capabilities at one’s disposal, the scaling down of political commitments abroad, and the reluctance to impose one’s preferences unilaterally over one’s allies and partners. Restraint does not impose a choice between doing all and not doing anything, or action and passivity, but rather confronts decision-makers with a choice between more and less international involvement. Hence, if restraint pleads for reduced implication overseas, assertiveness advocates sustained activism abroad. As such, assertiveness covers a policy array encompassing conquest, the constitution of protectorates and spheres of influence, the acquisition of military bases, activist diplomacy, interventionism, and increased unilateral decision-making.⁶ In the end, the US choice of a grand strategy is reducible to a decision between assertiveness and restraint, or on whether to begin the defense of the United States on the American side of the water or on the other side. This question represents the oldest and most fundamental issue of US foreign policy.⁷

THE PUZZLE

Why is US post–Cold War assertiveness puzzling? Before the onset of the ongoing economic crisis in the fall of 2008, there were few reasons to fear that the United States risked being supplanted as the dominant power. Dominant power refers to a state that surpasses others in economic and military capabilities as well as their successful use, and thus possesses broad-spectrum capabilities exercised across the global system. Nevertheless, a dominant power is not strong enough to lay down the law to other states, which would represent a condition of hegemony. Basically, the dominant state is the strongest state in the system at any given time without necessarily being omnipotent. Unipolarity is simply a subcategory of dominance, as it designates a power configuration in which one state both “excels in all the component elements of state capability” and has significantly more capabilities than other great powers. In other words, a greater gap separates the dominant state from its nearest competitor in unipolarity than under other configurations of power.⁸

The US lead over other great powers has never been so pronounced as in the post–Cold War. In the words of Kennedy: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close.”⁹ Since no other state can realistically compete against it, the United States has been enjoying since the end of the Cold War a period of uncommon security- and status-plenty. Therefore, the United States should have been able to afford the benefits of leadership exercised with fewer expenses, which suggests that conditions were particularly ripe for putting into practice a policy of restraint. As Jervis put it, “The United States should be then a very conservative state in its foreign relations; with its power and dominance thus assured, it should be the quintessential status quo power. It makes a puzzle of Washington’s current behavior, which is anything but conservative.”¹⁰ Restraint should have been all the more recommendable because it is also arguably the smartest course of action for a dominant power to reassure the world it is not going to abuse its power. No wonder then that the majority of post–Cold War foreign policy studies have recommended restraint as the guiding principle of US grand strategy.¹¹ Furthermore, while in over two decades of post–Cold War, assertiveness has produced undeniable costs in treasury and lives, it is yet to provide tangible benefits in security and power for the United States.

Nonetheless, by the time US troops rolled into Baghdad, few would have disagreed with the assessment that restraint had failed, being supplanted by an unambiguous policy of assertiveness. This new orientation, inaugurated in the last stages of the Bosnia War, included the bombing of Iraq and Yugoslavia in 1998 and 1999 without a UN Security Council sanction, the rejection of treaties such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty between 1998 and 2001, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hence, there is a legitimate reason to inquire into what brought about this paradoxical course of action.

THE ARGUMENT

The answer I suggest is based on three hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that US assertiveness in the post–Cold War was caused foremost by a growing concern among US leaders with maintaining the state’s prestige in the eyes of the world. Prestige designates the deference that the United States demands from the other states in the system on account of being recognized as the dominant state. The second hypothesis is that even though the United States was not threatened by any competition, its prestige was vulnerable to symbolic challenges. By symbolic challenges I mean the failure of lower-ranked actors to award the proper level of deference to a superordinate state. While such challenges do not affect the actual status of the state, they cast a doubt as to its competence and effectiveness in holding a higher rank. The third hypothesis is that these symbolic challenges led the United States to favor an assertive course of action that would have allowed it to reassert its prestige, as well as to exact retribution on the challengers.

The higher the status or hierarchical rank of a social actor, the more pronounced its prestige in that respective group. If this demand for prestige is not recognized in a way that satisfies its expectations of appropriate deferential treatment, the actor is likely to take measures to assert its credentials through demonstrations of achievements and through the castigation of those who would challenge its superiority through real or imagined offenses. A dominant power, and, even more so, a unipole requires more prestige than ordinary polities on account of being in possession of formidable military and economic capabilities, as well as of its perceived ability to use them successfully. If prestige is not granted to the degree it requires, this is seen as an offense, since it calls into question its right of being worthy of a superior rank. These challenges have to be answered, both to demonstrate the state has “what it takes” to preserve its dominant status and to take revenge on those who offend it. As a result, the United States has to resort to assertive measures, such as using military force or/and treading on the sensibilities of other states, in order to support its claim to world leadership. Thus, the requirements of prestige and those of restraint cannot help but clash.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States thought it would be automatically granted prestige by other states. Accordingly, from the Gulf War to the conclusion of the ethnic warfare in Bosnia, the United States predicated its foreign policy on the assumption that restraint would prove the most effective strategy in providing a more peaceful and cooperative world with governance and at the same time safeguarding American values and interests. That is certainly not to say that foreign policy under George H. W. Bush and Clinton represented the most restrained policy imaginable, but rather that it constituted a relatively moderate strategic choice. But as the decade progressed, the world frustrated American expectations that it was about turn into a more peaceful place, through turmoil in Somalia, Bosnia, North Korea, Haiti, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq. Furthermore, the United States found out that it could not rely on the full-hearted support of other states for its political initiatives. As a result, by the late 1990s, despite its superiority in capabilities, the United States faced a context where it was flouted by much weaker international actors, such as Belgrade and Baghdad; and its allies and partners refused to allow it special dispensation in its initiatives on international crimes, missile defense, or dealing with challengers. Therefore, US decision-makers arrived at the conclusion that the experiment with restraint was too costly in terms of prestige. The result of this mounting dissatisfaction with restraint was the launching of an assertive strategy aimed at recouping prestige and punishing challengers. The United States conducted large-scale military operations against Baghdad and Belgrade without the seal of approval of the UN Security Council and claimed special treatment in the contexts of the negotiations over the ICC and missile defense. When its demands for peculiar privileges and exemptions were rejected by the other sides involved, the United States abandoned participation in the respective institutional frameworks. Finally, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States needed to demonstrate to the world its steadfastness. Iraq provided the most suitable ground for mounting such a convincing demonstration of strength.

The field of International Relations has recently witnessed a heightened interest in status and prestige.¹² This new-found popularity has to do with the need to explain better instances of conflict that would be perplexing if considered from the points of view of material gains and of physical security. These instances are much more frequent than previously thought: a recent study found that out of the 94 interstate wars fought between 1648 and 2008, 62 (or 58 percent) were motivated by standing, and a further 11 (or 10 percent) by revenge, as compared to traditionally accepted causes such as security or material interest (18 and 7 percent, respectively.)¹³ Moreover, accounts based on status and prestige appear increasingly persuasive in an interval in which the traditionally accepted material incentives for conflict are muted, due to factors such as the declining benefits of conquest, the spread of democratic peace, and the influence of nuclear weapons.¹⁴ Yet, the vast majority of the status and prestige studies are devoted to the role these factors play in the foreign policy of rising states, who claim more prestige as they rise. Therefore, the effect of prestige for the dominant power has so far been neglected.¹⁵

This inquiry helps fill this gap. Furthermore, this endeavor is also policy relevant by shedding light on whether assertiveness represents a correctible anomaly, or whether it is a harbinger of things to come in US foreign policy. One testimony of how hard it is to practice restraint is the continually increasing number of analyses over the last two decades urging it. Hence, if US decision-makers had really been able to heed this advice, there would have been little reason to repeat it so often. Consequently, this investigation highlights the limitations restraint is likely to encounter and suggests a reexamination of the policy recommendations regarding US grand strategy.

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES AND EVIDENCE

This inquiry compares and contrasts the hypotheses of a prestige-motivated assertive foreign policy against the main three alternative accounts as well as against the historical record. These alternative theories are structuralism, exceptionalism, and revisionism:

• For structuralism, the United States cannot help but seek additional power—this strategy being compulsive for any state that has reached an unrivalled level of power capabilities vis-à-vis the other great powers. States that have the power to conduct an assertive foreign policy, and nevertheless refuse to do so, are eventually forced into it by the international system by means of multiplying security threats.

• For exceptionalism, the United States follows an assertive policy in order to spread to other shores its cherished political values—democracy and freedom.

• For revisionism, the question to be asked is re...