Will Bandwagoning Trump Balancing?

From Iraq to Libya, Iran, France, Germany, Russia...

Ira Straus

It was obvious to everyone, except perhaps Howard Dean, that the capture of Saddam Hussein would have positive fall-out for American security. What comes as a surprise is the speed and scope of the fall-out. A whole series of diplomatic objectives have been attained.

Rogue states have suddenly made major new commitments on non-proliferation. Recalcitrant allies have suddenly made commitments on Iraqi debt reduction. Longstanding obstacles have fallen one after another, like a row of dominoes. America is seen as victorious; countries do not want to stay on its bad side. Instead of joining together to balance against America, they are jumping on the bandwagon with America.

In the jargon of international relations studies, “bandwagoning” has replaced “balancing” as the predominant “game” on the stage. American power, it is argued for example by William Wohlforth in Foreign Affairs, is so strong in so many spheres -- military, financial, ideological, cultural -- that it is futile to try to balance against it. Good relations with America become the first priority for everyone. Unipolarity is here to stay, and it isn’t the Atlantic democracies that constitute the global unipole for Wohlforth: it is simply America.

If this is true, then the current successes are not the end of the matter. More are to come, as the bandwagoning continues.

For those who doubted the advisability of the Iraq war -- and I should confess to have been among them -- the bandwagoning and the progress on non-proliferation give cause to reconsider.

To be sure, not all the news is good. The war brought a massive undertow of resentment. Polls worldwide showed an average 16 percent swing in attitudes toward more hostility for America -- a truly extraordinary figure on the global scale. And unlike the case of Afghanistan, attitudes did not recover after the Iraq war. This puts in doubt the sustainability of the bandwagoning: it has relied too heavily on fear or on buying off foot-draggers -- practices that reinforce the resentment, in contrast to the effects of genuine mutual support. A different, innovative diplomacy will be needed to renew alliance sentiment and consolidate the bandwagoning trend

Nonetheless, the accomplishments are impressive. The war makes far more sense, when viewed through the angle of the struggle against proliferation in all countries rather than in Iraq alone. The Administration, in its global anti-proliferation struggle, has been employing all along the full spectrum of means advocated by its critics, at least when dealing with rogue states: a full-court diplomatic press, supplemented by military force in Iraq and threat of force elsewhere. In more cases than not, it has been working.  

As soon as Iraq was occupied, public pressures were placed on Iran. It was informed it could be next. The EU, playing good cop to the U.S. bad cop, got an unprecedented agreement out of Iran for nuclear inspections. And a hardheaded deal at that, one that could truly be welcomed by America.  

Next, U.S.-UK pressures on Libya bore fruit. Libya agreed to snap inspections and began cooperating proactively on revealing and dismantling its WMD program, in a way that Saddam never had. Libya had started making its overtures on the eve of the storming of Iraq; it rushed to come in from the cold where it had been lingering for years -- and where it suddenly seemed too dangerous to stay.

One could not imagine the new Iranian and Libyan commitments, had it not been for America’s willingness to enforce its threats on Iraq. That action changed the structure of incentives for other rogue states. It turned WMD programs from potential sources of power into potential sources of ruin.

It turns out that, when Colin Powell went to the UN and demanded a high standard for Iraqi compliance, it had a meaning going far beyond Iraq. Powell’s standard, let us recall, was to stop waiting for the world to prove that Saddam had WMD, and instead require him to comply fully with Security Council resolutions and give unqualified, pro-active cooperation to inspectors. This is the standard that Libya is now saying it will abide by. Without America’s enforcement of the standard in Iraq, Libya would have offered far less -- something that would have left the situation unresolved.

Nor was the war solely a matter of being hard on rogue states. It was a matter of raising the non-proliferation standards for all states, rogue or not. Making an example of Saddam, either by compelling his cooperation or removing him, was necessary for raising the standards. Yielding to his half-cooperation would have amounted to caving in on the broader question of making the global non-proliferation regime work. No one would have ever offered more than Saddam, if he had been allowed to get away with hide-and-seek games.

Thus, the war has proved a matter of Iran as well as Iraq. And Libya. And Russia and the EU, which have taken a more honest anti-proliferation line on Iran now that America has shown it means business. And a matter of China, whose cooperation has been needed on Pakistan, Korea, and elsewhere. And North Korea -- a dangerous case, one where the public announcement of the pre-emptive doctrine only made things worse, absent a readiness to use it, yet that could still be resolved with Chinese help. And Pakistan, which is beginning to investigate its scientists’ aid to the Iranian nuclear program and to cooperate on plugging the leaks.

The matter is, as we can see from this list, far from over. Much will have to be done to complete the work of this war.

Much will also have to be done to buttress the alliances needed for this work. Non-proliferation cannot succeed if major powers act as sieves for advanced technologies and as diplomatic backstops for rogue regimes. Creative work will be needed to undo the damage in global attitudes: unipolarity cannot endure on a basis of global resentment. The “unipole” will need to be reconceptualized along the lines akin to Charles Krauthammer’s original phrasing of it -- global leadership by the entire Western world, led in turn by the U.S. -- rather than America alone.

It is the massive hegemonic weight of the West, coupled with America’s specific weight and resolve, that provides stability for unipolarity. The West as a whole needs to be enabled to take pride in leading the world, not left to sulk in resentment while America alone takes pride.

Shared pride in global leadership was not possible in the first hundred years of the Atlantic alliance. The original Atlanticist theorists and leaders -- Mahan, Fiske, Theodore Roosevelt -- hoped for it, but America kept nursing its resentments of European empires until the 1960s. When the Alliance was institutionalized in 1949 as NATO, America forbad that it include mutual support in the imperial domains “out of area”. Later, with the tables turned and the old empires destroyed, Europeans learned to throw back at America the anti-imperialist language it had imposed on them. Only on intra-European power politics issues did solidarity prevail. Fortunately that sufficed: it was the heart of the global struggle until 1991.

The new reality is that the heart of the struggle is out of area; the need for active mutual reliability among the Western countries is worldwide. This turns what was wish for Mahan and Roosevelt into a matter of necessity.

There has been a maturing underway to meet the reality, although chances for more rapid maturing were neglected. NATO has, since 1989, gone deeper each year into out-of-area action, and the word “empire” is no longer used solely as a pejorative in America. This maturing is not yet commensurate with the reality. It rarely succeeds even in making for identification with one another’s use of power (excepting Britain, which, as the mother country, has long identified with American power and enjoyed what has been called a “vicarious imperialism”). In Afghanistan, shared pride in the military victory was forestalled by the refusal to allow France, or NATO collectively, a role in the fighting. In Iraq, the prewar diplomatic rifts played out even worse: the American victory was felt in most European countries as a national humiliation. Today, the patching over of the most glaring rifts in the West -- which is proceeding with the limited means of bandwagoning, immediate interests, and elite habits of alliance -- has not overcome this sentimental damage, but re-creates some of the space for further maturing, and for the deeper renovations that are needed.

It will help, when repairing the rifts, if the war comes to be seen in terms of global non-proliferation. In this broader context, the opponents of the war are turning out, on balance, mistaken. To the extent that the resentments were based on truncated perception, they should be abandoned, not nurtured or used as bargaining chips as might be done among adversaries. They should try, as good European realists who know the meaning of alliance, to recognize the fact and bury the emotional hatchet. At the same time, Americans should recognize the reality that, in life, recognition of fact can never eliminate the need for effort in repairing the fabric of a relationship. Fact at most can facilitate effort. And America, as leader, must initiate the effort.

The central fact is that the work against proliferation was already proceeding quietly along a broad front when the war began. It would not be surprising if, in historical perspective, this broader anti-proliferation struggle came to be identified as the true purpose of the war. It is a struggle with which the allies can identify: the UK and EU have come to play essential roles in it.

The war in Iraq makes sense once seen as a move in this global struggle. But the global non-proliferation struggle will itself make unambiguous sense only when it reaches fruition in an integrated, unipolar community of the main nuclear powers, working together to undo past proliferations and prevent new ones. This underlines how much remains to be done. What has meanwhile been accomplished makes it realistic to suggest that the rest could soon be under pursuit.

Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, and a lecturer in Atlantic studies for universities in Europe and Russia.