Every vision is based on a premise or on a mix of premises, and the richer the mix perhaps the sounder the vision. The key to envisioning the future is the premise or premises selected, either consciously or unconsciously, to form the value paradigm of the vision.
Only a few years ago, the most popular such premise was the need to build a New World Order in order to keep the peace. After the relative stability of two generations of bi-polar confrontation between Communism and Democracy, the end of this era and of the possibility of ruling the world in a super-power condominium or duopoly triggered the creation of an intellectual fad known as the New World Order.
President Bush, who was one of the first converts to the idea, changed its popular name from Pax America to what he called a pax universalis. Despite the name change, the rest of the world perceived a ``made in America'' imprint. Some, or indeed most, of the people in the Third World feared that the objective was to destroy other cultures. Most of those in the First World, including most Americans, thought that the rationale behind the new policy was to spread the institutions of pluralist democracy and private enterprise as means to promote human dignity.
Both of these perceptions were naive. The rationale behind the drive toward a New World Order was simply to maintain stability in a world that had lost its moorings. The popularity of the concept can be explained psychologically as a projection into foreign policy of the same fears that threatened to destroy American society at home. The solution at home was the Omnibus Crime Bill, which attempted to cure the effects of violence without really addressing the causes. The solution for the rest of the world was the New World Order, backed up by an increased ``national defense'' budget and new technology to reduce the domestic political costs of waging war in order to deter, squelch, or simply annihilate threats to America's ``vital interests.'' The danger of attempting to impose what others might perceive to be a made-in-America order on the world is that the fears leading to American military intervention might be paranoid.
The depths of paranoia that underlay the New World Order mentality at its inception, and still survive in discussions throughout Washington, seemed to be brought out during the fall of 1991 in the blue-ribbon report prepared for the
Commander in Chief of U.S. Strategic Forces and Director of U.S. Nuclear Targeting, Air Force General Lee Butler. As revealed by the Washington Post on January 6, 1992, and analyzed in a lengthy position paper by the present author a week later in the Eastern Times, the result of this five-month study by 21 of America's most prestigious global strategists was to recommend scrapping the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) under which U.S. strategic weapons were targeted on the Soviet Union. Instead a reduced inventory of nuclear weapons would be targeted in four strike options, three focused on the republics of the former Soviet Union and one on other Third World countries that might pose military, political, or economic threats to U.S. interests as the world's only superpower. The fifth option called for the use of advanced non-nuclear weapons to destroy political and military leadership in surgical strikes at potential foes world-wide.
The only real controversy was over the question whether nuclear arms can deter conventional military actions by the world's lesser powers, much less deter threats to America's global economic interests. The Chairman of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff Advisory Group, which prepared the plan, former Air Force Secretary Thomas C. Reed, announced in the formal text that, ``Most of us reject the thesis that the only purpose of nuclear weapons in the new world order is to deter nuclear attack. ... Nuclear weapons continue to have a number of important and subtle influences, and remain a significant resource of U.S. power in a dangerous world.''
Former Secretary of Defense McNamara led the minority position, based on the nucleophobic and outdated strategic illusion of the 1960's, that nuclear weapons have only military but no political value. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, led another minority position that nuclear weapons are not necessary anyway to impose American solutions to the problems of the world, as shown allegedly by the Gulf War which he had recently orchestrated.
Three powerful counter-arguments to General Powell's position are that the chances of ever again enjoying a half-year leadtime to develop combat-readiness are slight, the U.S. president may very well not be able to orchestrate the necessary international support for a major buildup like Desert Storm a second time around, and for both economic and domestic political reasons the United States cannot afford many more such conventionally-limited wars.
In his classified briefing on the report, which was leaked to the Washington Post by its opponents, no doubt in order to start a national debate on the new world order, General Reed asserted that the nation ``must keep nuclear weapons to protect itsfundamental interests ... [including] a healthy and growing U.S. economy,'' and added, if the United States moves from superpower to being an equal, others may decide to become equals as well.''
The panel recommended that to deter nuclear and chemical weapons proliferation, and to deter annihilation of states ``such as Israel,'' and to prevent the seizure of critical raw materials, a new branch of the armed forces should be created, called the Nuclear Expeditionary Force, armed with a handful of bombers and submarine-launched weapons as well as tactical nucs for ground warfare.
Reed commented that intercontinental attack options should include demonstrations of the type popularized by the present author's former boss, Herman Kahn, in his classic books of the 1960's, entitled On Thermonuclear War and Thinking the Unthinkable, involving one to ten nuclear warheads, each aimed at military targets on the former territory of the Soviet Union. This is designed, among other things, to permit surgical strikes at selected Muslim republics and to ``cause fewer casualties.'' General Reed noted that this new nuclear enforcement capability for the new world order would require the United States to terminate its 1979 pledge not to use nuclear arms against Third World countries that have no atomic weapons. This particular issue is still hotly debated, with the U.S. State Department arguing that non-nuclear countries should be immune from nuclear attack in order to promote non-proliferation.
Finally, according to the Washington Post, ``the report calls for the administration to retain a so-called `strategic reserve' of nuclear warheads to be used as needed for destruction of industrial plants on former Soviet territory, to target any non-Soviet nations that attempt to capitalize on U.S. wartime vulnerabilities, and to ensure U.S. military influence even after a nuclear exchange.''
Another quite different premise is the duty of the United States of America to lead a new world order rather than to impose one. Henry Kissinger developed this premise in his op ed article, entitled ``What Kind of a New World Order,'' in the Washington Post of December 3, 1991.
Kissinger opposed even mention of the term ``new world order,'' because he said that it presupposes a commonwealth of interests among the world's six major powers, namely, the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and India. He explained that these major players have different views on the nature of world order. He singled out Japan, which he forecasts will ``accelerate its subtle and relentless rearmament designed to regain control over its destiny,'' and India, which ``is the last -vestige of the heyday of European imperialism.'' He notes that ``before the arrival of the British, the subcontinent had not been ruled as a single political unit for millennia ... but having established unified rule ... India has retained a finely tuned sense for domination which causes it to insist on preeminence over all the territories controlled from New Delhi at the acme of British rule.''
Kissinger concluded that ``in a world of players of such dramatically different background, the basic premises of collective security simply will not work.'' Furthermore, he declared that the military strength of the United States is a declining asset and cannot bring unity where none already exists. Power in the future will be ``the nexus of political, military, and economic assets,'' and the power in the world will therefore be regionalized. American global strategy therefore should be regional in design and more discriminating in its purpose. The new agenda should focus on truly global issues to be addressed regionally. High priority should be given to nuclear proliferation, whereby, he seems to conclude, India will have responsibility for the Indian sub-continent (including Pakistan), Russia for Central Asia, and Israel for the Middle East.
This Kissingerian vision is a revamped version of his balance of power, which once applied only to the two superpowers but now has been adapted to promote a new world order based on a U.S. strategy to balance a half dozen powers, each with responsibility for its own region. A major advantage of this strategy is that the balance-of-power strategy adapted to a non-polar world is less dangerous than a U.S. strategy to control rather than orchestrate the world, if only because it is more realistic. All utopias are dangerous because utopians can become dangerously pathological when they face failure.
Another vision might be called unilateral leadership to promote a new world order. This can be dangerous or not depending on its vision of the preferred order. This vision of unilateral leadership was first proposed in 1957 in benign form by Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, the founder of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), formerly part of the University of Pennsylvania, who spoke of the democratic world that would inevitably follow the demise of Communism if the United States were prepared to seize the opportunity of leadership.
A highly malignant concept of this unilateral leadership scenario was presented by the director of the FPRI, Daniel Pipes, and distributed in its prestigious publication, Orbis, A Journal of World Affairs, in December, 1991, simultaneously with theclassified blue-ribbon panel report prepared for the Director of U.S. Nuclear Targeting. This vision of a world directly controlled by sophisticated American leadership was presented by Pipes to upstage Charles Krauthammer who had hoped to lead the world-order pack with his book, The First Global State, which subsequently was never published.
In his editorial introducing this issue of Orbis, Pipes pointed out that the very title of the journal, Orbis, comes from the Latin rendering of ``new world order,'' novus orbis terrarum, and this title was chosen by its founder, Robert Strausz-Hupe, to express his conviction, thirty-five years ahead of his time, that Communism inevitably would die and that within 50 years, i.e. sometime around the turn of the millennium, the United States would and must institute a new universal empire. This was needed, and, in Pipes' view, is needed now more than ever, in order ``to assure the survival of Western culture and of mankind'' against the growing threats posed by the ``political emergence of the Asian peoples'' and by their acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.
The brilliance and European urbanity of Strausz-Hupe impressed every American president, and he was an honored member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Although he never attended the global strategy councils in London and elsewhere, Strausz-Hupe never was far removed from the inner councils of the secular establishment. He was a non-conformist as a conservative's conservative, i.e., he based everything on higher principle. Nevertheless, Strausz-Hupe was in and out of the councils of pragmatic power-wielders, perhaps because his penultimate goal was the same as Kissinger's, namely, to orchestrate global power by intellectual control of elite thought in America. He knew where real power lies in any civilization and he saw the same threats to it.
The genius of Strausz-Hupe was considered to lie in his analysis of the global forces that threaten America and in his elaboration of a ``forward strategy'' to win the ``protracted conflict'' against these forces of chaos. His strategy for the post-Communist future was laid out almost forty years ago in his seminal think-piece, ``The Balance of Tomorrow,'' which was published in the first issue of his journal, Orbis, early in 1957. Key portions of this think-piece were published in the Winter 1991-1992 issue of Orbis as part of a well-orchestrated campaign to resurrect Strausz-Hupe's classical 20th-century threat analysis as the intellectual justification for a unilaterally led New World Order. The following few paragraphs give the flavor of the vision and strategy that some American strategists think the United States is now in a position to pursue:
The issue before the United States is the unification of the globe under its leadership within this generation. How effectively and rapidly the United States will accomplish this task will determine the survival of the United States as a leading power, probably the survival of Western culture, and conceivably the survival of mankind.
This task must be accomplished within the near future because of two overriding considerations: 1) the political emergence of the Asian peoples, together with their tremendous population growth, is altering profoundly the international and regional balance of power and presages regional and international conflicts and war; and 2) within the foreseeable future, a number of nations, other than the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, will acquire nuclear weapons and other means of mass destruction.
There are many and convincing reasons why this earth should be politically one. But these reasons, namely the explosive forces on the loose in Asia and the implications of a multiple balance of nuclear power, are sufficient to necessitate the establishment of unitary world rule. The collapse of ancient empires, the rise of population pressure, the disintegration of old cultures, and shifts in balance-of-power attended by radical changes in weapons techniques, have always been followed by revolution and war. There is no reason to believe that the contemporary statecraft has succeeded in ``flattening out'' the great cycles of history. By the same token, upon all revolutionary ages followed the establishment of a universal order in the image and under the domination of one power. The establishment of such a universal order has become now the sole alternative to anarchy and the destruction of what man has wrought since his ancestors left their caves. The one and only question therefore is who will be the people that will establish the universal order in their image and under their domination. ...
Nationalism is the greatest retrogressive force of this century. ... In our times, nationalism is restrained neither by liberal constitutions nor by concern for the common interests of mankind. It is checked only by superior political power; it has become the school for violence and dictatorship. It is narrowly parochial; it negates the promises and requirements of modern technology; it impedes the exchanges of goods and ideas and thus stunts economic and cultural growth.
While international pacts and charters pay homage to the idea of national sovereignty - that absolute of political absolutes - national independence has never been as much at the mercy of supranational forces as it is now. The idea of the equality of all national sovereignties, yesterday only a pious fiction politely sustained by diplomatic custom, today has been transformed into a dangerous tool of political warfare. It serves, in the international power struggle, as a screen for political and ideological penetration and subversion of first, the domestic, and then, the international order. ... Yet this hallucination does rule the conduct of the United Nations Assembly and, albeit with a different twist, the deliberations of U.S. policy.
The history of the last twenty years should be viewed as a series of conflicts of federative power. Both Germany and Japan attempted to create regional federations, the one a system of ideologically coordinated dictatorships in Europe, the other a ``co-prosperity zone'' of nationalist and ``anti-colonial'' dictatorships in Asia. Neither possessed the means required for the task because each launched it from a base - the German and the Japanese nation state - that was too narrow. Each dishonored the term federation by baseness of motive and monstrosity of conduct. Neither was able to contrive that semblance of a community-of-interest without which any federative effort is doomed from the start. Each had to revert to the use of naked power in order to keep the system from falling apart. Yet their functional conceptions were in complete harmony with historical necessity: the making of regional systems encompassing a number of states. The various organizations, for example, of European economic integration, do not differ greatly in functional design from those planned by Nazi Germany. Undoubtedly, the ``take'' of Nazi Germany would have been exorbitant - at least in the beginning. But the Nazi planners had a perfectly reasonable understanding of the economic interdependence of Europe and the economic and technological inadequacy of the nation state.
The defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of Britain and France not only close the epoch of the nation state as a viable unit of world politics but also furnish proof that the nation state cannot transcend itself. It cannot step across its own shadow and raise itself to the plateau of federative power. ...
The United States now meets with historical necessity. The United States remains as the sole holder of federative power. The one question to be answered is: will the United States do what must be done? ...
The United States is uniquely fitted for leadership in global unification. The immense military power of the United States is, of course, the first and indispensable attribute of leadership. ...
Will the coming world order be the American Universal empire? It must be that - to the extent that it will bear the stamp of the American spirit. Since the American
spirit is that of an open society - open to all men and all cultures - and since the political genius of America is the federative idea, the distinction between rulers and ruled will fade into a continuous process of assimilation. The coming world order will mark the last phase in a historical transition and cap the revolutionary epoch of this century. The mission of the American people is to bury the nation states, lead their bereaved peoples into larger unions, and overawe with its might the would-be saboteurs of the new world order who have nothing to offer mankind but putrefying ideology and brute force.
It is likely that the accomplishments of this mission will exhaust the energies of America and that, then, the historical center of gravity will shift to another people. But this will matter little, for the opening of new horizons which we now faintly glimpse will usher in a new stage in human history; man will have found in cosmic ventures an equivalent for war. Man may still destroy himself but then he will do so by means other than international war. This part of the human story is still mercifully veiled to anyone now living. For the next fifty years or so the future belongs to America. The American empire and mankind will not be opposites but merely two names for the universal order under peace and happiness. Novus orbis terrarum.
Like all great thinkers and visionaries, Strausz-Hupe was controversial and has been invoked by those who would harness his genius to their own narrow interests. He was often vilified because all politics for him was moral crusade and he always knew the enemy. For him, unlike for Kissinger, Communism was not a geopolitical force but an evil empire. When Strausz-Hupe asked me in 1965 to join his organization as his eventual successor, he asked me to write a book on the false premises (i.e. false gods) of compromise with Communism, which were then being installed under Kissinger's auspices in a strategy of ``condominium'' or bipolar control of the world.
Although Strausz-Hupe was independent of all organized religion, he clearly recognized that the only real power of the new global federation that he advocated under U.S. leadership would be moral authority. And he saw that one cannot exercise moral authority while denying the authority of morality.
This conceptual emphasis on basing all foreign policy on absolute truth derivative from a transcendent source put Strausz-Hupe and Kissinger at opposite poles of the metaphysical spectrum, as well as on opposite sides of the cultural warfare that has racked Euro-America and through it the entire world for more than a century.
In one area especially, he and Kissinger had a potentially sharp conflict in views. Strausz-Hupe saw both Zionism and Islam as potential allies against Communism and in building a new world order. He did not even exclude a new civilizational force, such as a revived Islam, as the ``historical center of gravity'' in the twenty-first century. He was open to see in Zionism, as well as in Islam, both bad and good based on performance. This is why a most unfortunate misuse of Strausz-Hupe's heritage has been the attempt by some to use his concept of empire and of forward strategy against the Islamic peoples of the world. As Daniel Pipes' editorial in the Winter 1991-1992 issue of Orbis suggests, ``the same forward strategy used successfully against Moscow (may) now be used elsewhere.''
This use of basic premises by would-be intellectual trend-setters, like Daniel Pipes and other like-minded denizens of the world of thinktanks, can short-circuit thought by political leaders and lead to short-run policies that only strengthen the destabilizing forces of the world and constrict American policy options for the future.
The concept of protracted conflict between the old forces of the ``totalitarian'' Evil Empire and the white knights of the ``free world'' surfaced in muted but nevertheless clear form on February 8th, 1995, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich coined a new word for public debate. More than most other politicians, Gingrich knows that words matter, and that whoever controls the terminology of public debate has won the war for control of policy, because words are shorthand for entire visions and accompanying strategies.
At a conference of military and intelligence officers on developing global strategy, Speaker Gingrich announced, ``I have yet to see a coherent strategy for fighting Islamic totalitarianism.'' Whether by design or not, the use of this emotive word, ``totalitarianism,'' became an instrument of thought control and escalated the battle against terrorism to the ideological level of grand strategy, because totalitarianism was the major global threat to Western civilization for most of the 20th century.
The danger is that Islam might no longer be able to function as an ally of the free world against fascism and every kind of tyranny, as Robert Strausz-Hupe once envisioned it, but, by association with the term ``totalitarian,'' must become an inexorable and mortal enemy. By the mere turn of a phrase, Islam becomes not merely a religion that occasionally has been distorted to produce both private and state-sponsored terrorism, but a generic monster that must be fought wherever it raises its ugly head, because ``Islamic totalitarianism'' by definition threatens the survival of the free world. This simple change in terminology serves to short-circuit thought so that operational doctrine and specific military plans no longer have to be based on knowledge. The thinking has already been done and encapsulated in the new language, where a false symbolism becomes an unchallengeable reality. And by a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, the potential danger becomes real and thereby triggers a spiraling confrontation of action and reaction with the zero-sum result of universal chaos.
The beginnings of a more sophisticated vision of the global future may be replacing the original dream of a New World Order which has eroded in the streets of Mogadishu, Monrovia, Kigali (Rwanda), Sarajevo, Grozny, Srinagar (Kashmir), and a dozen other confrontations that for the participants were holocausts.
Some lessons to be drawn were suggested in Stephen John Stedman's thinkpiece, ``Alchemy for a New World Order,'' published in the May/June 1995 issue of the world's most influential magazine, Foreign Affairs, which is the official organ of the Council on Foreign Relations and the unofficial organ of the world's most influential thinktank, The Aspen Institute. According to Stedman, preventive diplomacy, which attempts to stop conflicts from becoming violent or escalating once they have started, has signally failed even where outside force was injected; and conflict prevention, which aims at the supposed roots of such conflicts, e.g. poverty, overpopulation, resource competition, and lack of legitimate political institutions, seems to have been simply irrelevant, in part because of Western policymakers' economic, social, and political determinism which simply misses the human element of aggression and greed.
The conclusion seems to be that justice needs to be factored in, though this word is a political ``no-no'' in polite circles and so was not directly mentioned. Instead, Stedman suggests that simple stability in the sense of securing the status quo or status quo ante can be destabilizing, and that policymakers should be alert to situations where a more fundamental stability can be achieved only by further and even furthering conflict. He concludes: ``A focus on prevention ignores the role that conflict plays in driving political change in societies. For grievances to be redressed, they must be vocalized. If they are vocalized, those with a stake in the status quo will attempt to suppress them. Often the balance of change depends on the ability of the aggrieved to amplify the conflict to increase their support. If we have learned anything from the disparate cases of conflict resolution in recent decades ... it is that some conflicts must be intensified before they are resolved.''