An afternoon of relaxation spent at the Rockbridge Regional Library here in Lexington, VA led me to stumble across an outstanding 120-page read: John Lewis Gaddis’ Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (reviews | pricing). This highly-accessible book, based on a series of lectures the author delivered at the New York Public Library in 2002, is a fascinating look at the evolution of America’s national security grand strategy throughout our short history. More specifically, Dr. Gaddis traces the role of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony through the inflection points of the War of 1812, World War II, and 9/11.

The lectures, easily consumed by an interested reader in two hours, provide a historical context sorely missing from today’s debate on the Bush Doctrine. The writer has a unique ability to objectively guide the reader into a topic commonly inflamed as a tinderbox of partisanship and emerge the listener from the argument with the feeling that the issue isn’t political in the least.

As is my habit, I’ve funneled a few particularly insightful thoughts from the book into the space below. I apologize if some of the excerpts below are less informative outside of the author’s original context–sitting down with the book would certainly provide the greater picture and pleasant learning experience. Comments, as always, are welcomed.

Pg. 37-38
Thus, over the decade that followed the first surprise attack on United States soil–the occupation of Washington by the British in August 1814, and the subsequent burning of the Capitol and the White House–American leaders evolved a strategy of forestalling future challenges by enlarging American interests. The principal elements of that strategy were: preemption where marauders might exploit the weakness of neighboring states, or where that weakness might tempt stronger states to establish a presence; unilateralism, so that the United States need not rely upon any other state to guarantee its security; and, finally, hegemony over the North American continent, in order that the dominant international system there would reflect a preponderance of American power rather than a balance among several powers, with all possibilities for wars, commercial rivalries, and revolutions that the latter arrangement had led to in Europe.Pg. 69-71
Both the British attack on Washington in 18114 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 revealed failures in what we would today call homeland security. The British invasion showed that the United States could no longer rely upon competition among the European great powers to keep it safe: wars in Europe had in the past, and might again, spill over onto the North American continent. The Japanese assault demonstrated that the United States could no longer depend upon continental or even hemispheric hegemony to insulate it from danger: new methods of projecting military strength across great distances meant that the rise of hostile states anywhere in the world could endanger our security.

It’s important to emphasize the word “states,” because it distinguishes the surprises of 1814 and 1941 from the one that occurred in 2001. The first two attacks did indeed come from states using a familiar form of power–military force–in unexpected ways. The remedies fell, therefore, within the traditional limits of diplomacy and warfare. The United States might seek to dissuade, deter, or defeat such adversaries, but whatever option it chose it would be dealing with an identifiable regime led by identifiable leaders operating by identifiable means from an identifiable piece of territory. We could assume, therefore, a more or less common calculation of costs versus benefits across the differences that separated us from our opponents. A sufficient level of diplomatic activity would remove whatever reasons there might be for hostility; if it didn’t, a sufficient accumulation of retaliatory capability would deter whoever remained hostile from attacking us; and if that didn’t work, a sufficient application of military strength would compel an eventual settlement or surrender.

None of these things was true of the terrorists who carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001. They acted on behalf of no state, for although Al Qaeda was operating from a base in Afghanistan, it’s not at all clear that Osama bin Laden consulted his Taliban hosts prior to launching the operation, or that–given the certainty of reprisal–they would have approved it had he done so. Nor can anyone claim that the destruction of the Taliban or the subsequent invasion of Iraq has removed the danger of future terrorist strikes, in the same way that defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II eliminated the threats those regimes posed. Nor is it likely that diplomacy or deterrence could have prevented the September 11th attacks, because those techniques require identifiable adversaries who have interests of their own–whether it be the survival of their regime or simply of themselves–which they wish to secure. The terrorists struck, as states can never do, from the sanctuary provided by anonymity: how does one negotiate with a shadow? Nor were they interested in their own survival: how does one deter someone who’s prepared to commit suicide?

Pg. 71-72
There have always been anarchists, assassins, and saboteurs operating without obvious sponsors, and many of them have been willing to risk their lives in doing so. Single acts of terror, however, have rarely in the past shaken the stability of states or societies because the number of victims they have targeted and the amount of damage they have caused have been relatively small…

September 11th was something new in this respect also. For although the attacks did not destabilize a regime–the effect was just the opposite–they certainly did shake a society. No previous act of terrorism had come anywhere close to the lives list and damage inflicted: indeed it would be difficult to think of any conventional military operation in which the results produced were so disproportionate to the resources expended. As President George W. Bush himself pointed out: “All of the chaos and suffering [the terrorists] caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank.” Or, to put it another way, by expending 19 lives and a few hundred thousand dollars, the attackers managed to kill some 3,000 people, to inflict as much as a hundred billion dollars’ worth or property damage, and to redefine the nature of our times.

Pg. 80-82
It was not just the Twin Towers that collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001: so too did some of our most fundamental assumptions about international, national, and personal security.

That was the situation President Bush confronted before that morning had ended. Any administration in such a crisis would have to rethink what it thought it knew about security and hence strategy; but this administration has done so in a particularly startling way, with striking results. To sense how much so, try a time travel exercise: place yourself back on that terrible day and ask how you would have responded had someone predicted the following:

That the United States would quickly respond by invading, and easily conquering, the nation any historian could have told you would be the most resistant to invasion and conquest, Afghanistan–and that it would have the support of the Afghan people and of most of the rest of the world in doing so. That the bush administration would then, over the next few months, undertake the most fundamental reassessment of American grand strategy in over half a century, and that it would publish the results of this rethinking, for all to read, discuss, and dissent from. That it would then, in a manner fully consistent with that strategy, seek the approval of its allies and the United Nations Security Council for what it regarded as the next logical step–going after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq–and that it would fail miserably in getting that approval.

That the United States would then nonetheless, with the help of Great Britain, go ahead and attack Iraq anyway, in the race of the direst warnings about the risks of military resistance, the use of weapons of mass destruction, the eruption of outrage in the Arab world, a new outbreak of terrorism, a huge increase in the price of oil, and astronomical estimates of the human and material costs of the operation–only to have none of these things happen. That among the things that did happen would be: a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue with the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia along with their redeployment to such formerly inhospitable locations as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzstan, Romania, and Bulgaria; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates.

Finally, that much of the rest of the world would find itself amazed, and if the truth be told somewhat alarmed, over the emergence of the United States as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001–as well as over one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V. If anyone had predicted all of this on that day, you might have wondered what pills they had been popping or what weed they’d been smoking. You almost certainly would not have taken them seriously. And yet, this is indeed what’s happened.

Pg. 93-94
How, though, to maintain the momentum, given that the Taliban was no more and that Al Qaeda wasn’t likely to present itself as a conspicuous target? This was where Saddam Hussein came in: Iraq was the most feasible place in which to strike the next blow. If we could topple that tyrant, if we could repeat the Afghan Agincourt along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, then we could accomplish a great deal. We could complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We could destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam might have accumulated since. We could end whatever support he was providing for terrorists beyond Iraq’s borders, notably those who acted against Israel. We could liberate the Iraqi people. We could ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We could set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. And, as President Bush did say publicly in a powerful speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, we could save that organization from the irrelevance into which it would otherwise descend if its resolutions continued to be contemptuously disregarded. The attraction of this particular stone was the number of birds it could simultaneously kill.

Pg. 111-113
A good place to start might be with Adam Smith, who saw as early as 1776 that the Americans “are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” The Wealth of Nations, in which that passage appeared, made the case that a collective good–prosperity–required the pursuit of individual interests within an open market. For the state or anyone else to try to determine those interests, or to restrict the choices allowed in pursuing them, or to incorporate them within some central plan–to attempt and of those things, Smith argued, would constitute an abridgment of liberty, the single individual interest everyone shares. In an increasingly complex world, he insisted, no authority possessed the competence to determine and then fulfill each individual’s interest. People could, however, be trusted to do their own determining and fulfilling, as long as they proceeded within a set of rules designed to safeguard their right to do so and the fairness with which they went about it.

Although we don’t often think of it in this way, the United States Constitution transferred Smith’s thinking from the realm of economics into that of politics. For it too assumed that the pursuit of individual interests within a fixed set of rules would produce a collective good: that’s what federalism was all about. It was at the same time, however, no prescription for paralysis. It would be absurd, Alexander Hamilton noted in the 23rd Federalist, to confide “to a government the direction of the most essential national interests, without daring to trust it to the authorities which are indispensable to their proper and efficient management… [This] is the strongest argument in favor of an energetic government; for any other can certainly never preserve the Union of so large an empire.”

A century and a half later, the United States projected its federal model abroad as it assumed its international responsibilities, at first unsuccessfully in the form of Wilson’s League of Nations, then more successfully through the United Nations, and most successfully of all through the consensual coalition American leaders built and maintained throughout the Cold War for the purpose of containing international communism. At no point was there an effort to centralize all decision-making in a single location, or to entrust it to a single individual. At no point did power alone confer legitimacy: just as the Constitution gave Delaware an equal voice with Pennsylvania in the United States Senate, so Luxembourg was accorded the same status as France, West Germany, and Great Britain within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At no point as well, though, was paralysis permitted: in a manner fully consistent with the spirit of federalism, the American system of Cold War alliances balanced the leadership needed in seeking a common good against the flexibility required to satisfy individual interests. It provided a way for the United States to wield power while minimizing arrogance, and that’s not a bad model for an even more powerful United States in a post-September 11th world.

If this record confirms, as I think it does, the “transferability” of Smith’s principles in geopolitics as well as politics, then it would seem to follow that a twenty-first-century empire of liberty should not content itself with making the world safe for democracy, or for diversity, or even primarily for the United States. Rather, it should seek to make the world safe for federalism, from which all the rest would flow. Adam Smith’s grand design–applied more widely that even his prophetic sensibility could have ever imagined–has served this country in particular, as well as the cause of freedom in general, remarkably well. All the more reason, then, not to discard it lightly now that Americans have the opportunity once again to do so much designing.

Pg. 115-117
The question “Why do they hate us so?” was a reasonable one to ask at the time, but as we’ve learned more about the attackers it’s become clear that the better question would have been: “Why do so few hate us so much that they would strike us in that way?” It wasn’t poverty, injustice, or any other morally justifiable grievance that caused them to do so. It was because they agreed with Lincoln. We are, therefore, like the Twin Towers, an irresistible target for those few whose aspiration is to kill hope.

How, then, do we keep hope alive when the costs and risks of doing so have suddenly become much greater? The first thing I’d say is that we have to be ready to fight for it. I shall always remember one of my Yale undergraduates getting up before a group of students and faculty one evening shortly after September 11th and announcing: “I love this country. I love this place. I love what we’re doing here tonight. I love it so much that I’m prepared to defend our right to do it, which is why I’m joining the Marines. It’s people like me who make it possible for people like you to be here doing what you’re doing.”

And so, indeed, it is. Our ability as a democracy to question all values depends on our faith in and determination to defend certain values. They are the bedrock beliefs that make it possible for us to be here and for so many others to wish to be. Of course these are social constructions, as my post-modernist colleagues would be quick to point out, but it’s our society that constructed them. That makes them worth fighting for, as so many others have done before us.