Forging their own vision of empire

When George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency against Al Gore, he couldn’t name the president of Pakistan. But since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, no one has done more than Bush to create the most contentious U.S. foreign policy debate since the Vietnam War. Three camps have emerged.

The first is made up of traditional Republican realists such as former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria. It sees Bush as squandering U.S. power and needlessly antagonizing allies. The second camp goes further: Where financier George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, discerns a “supremacist ideology” redolent of the Nazi era, novelist Arundhati Roy warns that for the “first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony.”

The third camp of neoconservatives couldn’t agree more -- and thinks it’s a good thing. Only American hegemony, argue Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, can safeguard the world. It’s America’s duty to follow in the footsteps of the British empire to remake Afghanistan and the Middle East. In Bush they see a visionary, a leader on the order of Winston Churchill staring down the forces of totalitarianism and Democratic appeasers. “There is no middle way for Americans,” announce David Frum and Richard Perle in their new neocon manifesto “An End to Evil.” “It is victory or holocaust.”

In his new book, “The Rise of the Vulcans,” James Mann trains a practiced eye on these debates. (“Vulcans” is the term Bush advisors used to describe themselves during the 2000 campaign.) Mann, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent and a foreign affairs expert, has conducted numerous interviews with former and current administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and has delved into the archives. The result is the most detailed and comprehensive account of the Bush foreign policy team to date.

Mann seeks to show that a kind of shadow Republican foreign affairs cabinet has existed for decades and exerted a more profound influence on U.S. foreign policy than anyone has realized. He carefully traces the battle within the GOP between followers of Henry A. Kissinger’s amoral realpolitik and Ronald Reagan’s anticommunism. Bush plays only a bit part, while Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul D. Wolfowitz and others occupy center stage. Whether Mann succeeds in fully analyzing their performances is another question.

As Mann notes, Rumsfeld and Cheney first teamed up to oppose Secretary of State Kissinger’s pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Rumsfeld, who was White House chief of staff for President Ford, and Cheney, who was his deputy, were infuriated by what they perceived as the U.S. truckling to a totalitarian power. In a July 8, 1975, memo to Rumsfeld, Cheney complained that Kissinger was preventing Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from meeting Ford: The Soviets, Cheney wrote, “have been perfectly free to criticize us for our actions and policies ... to call us imperialists, war-mongers ... and I can’t believe they don’t understand why the President might want to see Solzhenitsyn.” Kissinger, who believed that the United States was in decline and shouldn’t upset the Kremlin, quashed Cheney’s move. Ford refused to meet Solzhenitsyn.

At the same time, a new neoconservative faction, disgusted by both 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s isolationist “Come Home America” campaign and Kissinger’s unsavory machinations, was emerging within the Democratic Party. Fearful that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race and that U.S. resolve to back Israel was waning, neoconservatives such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and academic Jeane Kirkpatrick initially tried to push the Democratic Party to oppose any American overtures to the Kremlin before decamping to the GOP in 1980.

Perhaps no one is more central to the neoconservative movement than erstwhile Democrat Wolfowitz, who long ago rejected the relativism and realpolitik of Kissinger. As a student at Cornell, Mann notes, Wolfowitz studied with political theorist Allan Bloom, author of the influential “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom was a disciple of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose work influenced many neoconservatives, including a number now serving in the Bush administration.

Strauss, who had witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic into Nazism in the early 1930s, venerated ancient Athens as the fount of democracy. He warned about the flaccidity of liberalism when confronted by totalitarian movements and viewed Winston Churchill as a modern-day Pericles. He believed an elite group of philosophers, as in Plato’s “Republic,” should instruct a political leader about the perils of moral relativism. In essence, the battle in the GOP over foreign policy might be boiled down to the different lessons that two Jewish refugees took from the collapse of Weimar Germany: One, Kissinger, suggesting that survival meant not being too squeamish about cutting deals with unpleasant characters and countries; the other, Strauss, insisting that America had to stand for liberty in facing totalitarian regimes.

If Strauss’ thought instilled in Wolfowitz the perils of suspending moral judgments and the need to confront tyranny, he was also influenced by the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter, who decisively shaped U.S. strategic doctrine in the 1950s to protect against a surprise attack, began promoting missile defense in the late 1960s and advised Rumsfeld how to undermine Kissinger’s detente. Wohlstetter had numerous proteges who ended up working in the U.S. government. By the early 1970s, Wolfowitz, who had earned a PhD in political science under Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, was working at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which had been taken over by neoconservative opponents of Kissinger. “More than any other single figure in the Republican foreign policy hierarchy,” writes Mann, “Wolfowitz viewed himself as Kissinger’s opposite, his adversary in the realm of ideas.”

The hawks, however, needed a political leader to carry out regime change within the GOP. Enter Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who had championed missile defense and tax cuts since the 1960s, unsuccessfully challenged Ford for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976. But at the 1976 convention, the Reagan forces rammed through a plank on “morality on foreign policy” that praised Solzhenitsyn in the party platform. Cheney persuaded Ford to cave. According to Mann, the plank “represented a crushing defeat for Kissinger and for detente.” Even as Cheney and Rumsfeld were battling Kissinger, Wolfowitz was engaged in a similar effort inside the intelligence community. Steeped in Wohlstetter’s skepticism about the abilities of intelligence analysts, Wolfowitz joined a “Team B” that studied CIA official estimates and painted a much darker portrait of Soviet abilities and aims. Years later, Wolfowitz would create his own mini-Team B inside the Pentagon to challenge CIA estimates on Iraq.

As Mann notes, the splits that first surfaced among Republicans in the 1970s never went away. Under Reagan, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in that administration pushed for democratizing the Philippines and championed the cause of the Nicaraguan contras who were fighting the Sandinista regime. But once George Bush senior became president, realists such as Colin L. Powell and Scowcroft held the upper hand. They were interested in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but not in marching to Baghdad. For all the GOP’s criticism of Bill Clinton, Bush the younger showed no appetite for invading Afghanistan, let alone Iraq, before Sept. 11. Only then did George W. Bush come down firmly on the side of the neoconservatives who wanted to remake the Middle East.

Mann ably recounts the maneuverings of Cheney and Co., and his restraint is laudable. Unfortunately, his book becomes a little like listening to a play-by-play sports announcer who provides copious details but lacks a colleague to supply color commentary. In Mann’s lapidary recounting, no one ever makes a brilliant move or a terrible mistake. Motives are always pure, and everyone is a public servant devoted to the commonweal.

What’s missing is an analysis of Bush’s presidency or, to put it another way, a context. Is Bush right to prosecute the war on terrorism so vigorously? Is Rumsfeld a brilliant visionary or a new Robert S. McNamara destroying the military? Was invading Iraq a good idea or a disaster? Is America really becoming an empire? Is this the most deceitful administration in decades -- or has it gotten a bum rap? Mann never says.

Mann avoids discussing ideology, which is a little peculiar given that he’s covering one of the most ideological groupings in recent history. The use of the word “holocaust” by Frum and Perle in their new book to describe what’s in store for the United States if it fails to defend itself against Islamic terrorism is hardly fortuitous. Many neoconservatives have been shaped by the trauma of the rise of the Nazi dictatorship, the murder of Jews and the precarious security of Israel. This is why Wolfowitz and Perle championed intervention in Bosnia, while leading Republicans such as Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) denounced Clinton for engaging in feckless humanitarianism. Similarly, Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a liberal war in spirit, even if Bush never adequately made the humanitarian case for ousting Hussein. The United States had a moral obligation, after shamefully abandoning the Kurds and Shiites in 1991, to rescue Iraqis from the depredations of Hussein and his camarilla. Unfortunately, Mann does not explore any of these themes. The most he concludes is that the administration’s policies reflect “the pursuit of unrivaled American power, the story of the rise of the Vulcans.”

Actually, they don’t. For one thing, there is no such coherent group as the Vulcans. Bush’s team is far too heterogeneous to be lumped into one camp. Powell, who has always been a reluctant interventionist, has much more in common with Democrats who opposed the war than with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Rice has proved an astute operator who jettisoned the realist views she espoused before Sept. 11 to move more closely to Bush’s endorsement of neoconservative views. Rumsfeld is a traditional conservative who wanted to topple Hussein but not expend much effort turning Iraq into a democracy. Ultimately, it’s Bush who has been the key player on everything from missile defense to the invasion of Iraq.

But Bush supporters and critics grossly exaggerate his ability to create the empire they detect. The occupation of Iraq suggests that, far from controlling the globe, the administration is struggling to maintain its footing. Considering the gaping budget deficits the administration is running, the real question is whether we are entering what Yale historian Paul Kennedy called imperial overstretch in the late 1980s. Despite all the doomsayers then, it was the Soviet Union, not the United States that collapsed. The violence in Iraq may subside and U.S. financial and military power remain preeminent. It would be no small irony if the man who called Greeks “Grecians” in 2000 turned out to be the most influential foreign policy president since Harry S. Truman. *