The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)—a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to “making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner.” We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting FPIF’s website: http://www.fpif.org/.

Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Around the World

National Interests and National Security
By Tom Barry, FPIF Codirector

II. Updates and Out-takes

MISSILE DEFENSE AND U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS
By Wade Huntley and Robert Brown, Nautilus Institute

FROM MAD TO NUTS
By William D. Hartung, World Policy Institute

III. Letters and Comments

CONGO: UNSETTLING EVENTS & ANALYSIS

CORRECTION

I. Around the World

During the early years of the Clinton administration, the president was widely criticized for not having a clear foreign policy agenda. George W. Bush comes to the presidency with the outlines of his agenda clearly drawn. It's a conservative, hard-nosed view of U.S. national interests and U.S. national security. Fuzzy notions about promoting democracy, human rights, and equity won't blur the sharp focus of the Republican agenda. Simply stated—as is Bush's style—U.S. foreign policy under the new watch will always pass the litmus test of directly furthering U.S. national interests. National security is defined clearly and simply as increasing U.S. military might.

The virtue of such a starkly drawn foreign policy is that it guards against undue U.S. meddling in the affairs of other nations. But such an exclusively self-referent foreign policy comes with grave risks. This America First foreign policy ignores the many benefits of international cooperation and multilateralism, while at the same time overlooking the new array of nontraditional threats to U.S. national welfare and security. It's a foreign policy vision that is blind to the dramatically reconfigured economic, political, environmental, and security dimensions of our era. This is a worldview where U.S. economic interests will always trump the environment, where the imperative of missile defense will leave behind the wisdom of arms control treaties, and where U.S. dominance and privilege will characterize global leadership.

Foreign Policy In Focus has launched a new initiative, called The Republican Rule, to monitor and critique the new foreign policy agenda. This FPIF effort is tracking the transition through policy commentaries and profiles of the new foreign policy officials in the administration. Last week FPIF hosted a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, during which seven members of our "think tank without walls" examined the implications of this new era of Republican rule.

Robert Borosage, codirector of the Campaign for America's Future, noted that the new administration has already made many of its priorities clear through its selection of its foreign policy advisers. The "military cast" of the new team, including a general as head of the State Department, has Borosage and other FPIF analysts wondering if the new crew of foreign policy officials will recognize that the threats to U.S. national security and to our national interests are not military threats. The analysts wonder how they will deal with the emerging threats that the U.S. and other countries now face: deepening economic polarization (with accompanying social and political instability) resulting from reckless market integration, financial instability from unregulated capital flows, climate change (which is accelerating faster than previously projected), pandemics sweeping through the third world, the disintegration of the transition states that is driving living standards back decades, and rising intrastate conflict.

By thinking in military terms and considering military spending, the likely answer is that those running the Republican rule will likely fail to concern themselves with these emerging threats. As Borosage said, "We've seen the military cast of Mr. Bush's priorities and the military cast of his team—and they do a disservice to the real problems the country faces."

(Around the World is a column by FPIF codirector Tom Barry that appears regularly in the Progressive Response.)

Sources for more information:

The Republican Rule
http://www.fpif.org/republicanrule/index.html

Campaign for America's Future
http://www.ourfuture.org/front.asp

II. Updates and Out-takes

MISSILE DEFENSE AND U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS
By Wade Huntley and Robert Brown, Nautilus Institute

(Editor's Note: A new FPIF policy brief by Wade Huntley and Robert Brown of the Nautilus Institute points to two foreign policy issues that will quickly spark major foreign policy debates inside the new administration, namely its promise to develop a missile defense system and its China policy. While most of the focus of current discussion about missile defense is on national missile defense—a variation of the Star Wars system proposed by the Reagan team—Huntley and Brown make the case that the pursuit of an aggressive theater missile defense system in East Asia could lead to new U.S.-China military tensions and preempt important proposals for the establishment of new common security regimes in the Asia-Pacific region. Their policy analysis is excerpted here and posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n03taiwan.html)

Longstanding cold war fears that missile defenses would destabilize nuclear deterrence led the United States and the Soviet Union to conclude the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 1972. Nevertheless, in the U.S., the attractions of missile defense endure, fueled most recently by the apparent Gulf War successes of the Patriot missiles and by perceived threats of long-range missile launches by so-called “rogue” states.

There are several levels of missile defenses. Lower-tier theater missile defense (TMD) weapons, such as the Patriot, attempt to intercept shorter-range missiles as they descend toward their targets. Upper-tier TMD weapons (now under development) aim to intercept missiles while they are still above the atmosphere, thus protecting wider areas of territory. Current leading upper-tier proposals include the land-based Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) system, which would be deployed on Aegis destroyers.

National Missile Defense (NMD) focuses on defending North America from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Unlike the more ambitious SDI (Star Wars) program promoted by the Reagan administration, the recently postponed Clinton administration NMD proposal would have deployed interceptors on North American soil to protect against a small number of ICBMs.

TMD and NMD proposals are more intricately linked than is often recognized. Although a key locus of these linkages in the Asia-Pacific region is China, the impact of proposed missile defenses on China is not sufficiently recognized. With a coalescing mandate to protect U.S. troops and fleets abroad, TMD development has proceeded without much scrutiny by U.S. citizens. The more rigorous NMD debate has focused mostly on the degrees of missile threats posed by states such as the DPRK (North Korea), NMD’s potential impact on U.S.-Russia relations,and the merits of the ABM treaty.

China’s concerns over both NMD and TMD, while differentiated and nuanced, fall generally into three categories. A major Chinese concern is TMD’s potential application to Taiwan. Many in Beijing believe that only China’s threat to use force deters an overt declaration of independence by Taiwan. Though many analysts doubt that China could successfully invade Taiwan to suppress independence, Taiwan is clearly vulnerable to China’s short-range missile force. Deployment of TMD in or near Taiwan would reduce China’s ability to use missile threats to politically intimidate Taiwan’s leaders. Moreover, any U.S. role in such deployment would signal (to both Taipei and Beijing) a greater likelihood of U.S. military support of Taiwan in the event of overt conflict. Thus, China worries that TMD deployment would bolster Taiwanese independence sentiments.

A second Chinese concern is the impact of TMD in East Asia. Currently, the U.S. and Japan are collaborating to develop TMD to protect Japanese targets against regional missile attacks, most specifically from the DPRK. Chinese analysts are not persuaded that the DPRK threat is so grave, and so U.S.-Japan TMD collaboration exacerbates Chinese fears that both countries seek less constraint to act against China. The strengthening of the U.S.-Japan Defense Guidelines, which conspicuously fail to define the geographic boundaries within which events could lead to joint U.S.-Japan military operations, underscores this Chinese perception.

These two concerns are directly linked. U.S.-Japan TMD planning now favors the NTW system, which would be deployed on Aegis cruisers that could be moved near Taiwan in the event of a conflict there. Hence, for China, NTW deployment in Japan would provide implicit TMD protection to Taiwan. Chinese leaders additionally worry that such deployment, combined with the open-ended regional scope of the U.S.-Japan defense guidelines, would open the door to direct Japanese involvement in a China-Taiwan conflict.

China’s third concern focuses on U.S. NMD plans. China is undertaking long-term modernization and expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, which U.S. strategic analysts perceive as a latent threat. Still, China’s nuclear force will remain relatively small, and the U.S. will retain a massive retaliation deterrent. Hence, even in the event of direct U.S.-China military conflict, the prospects of China launching nuclear missiles against the U.S. will remain slim. Nevertheless, China’s nuclear capabilities are a meaningful coercive instrument politically—however remote the prospect, Pentagon war planners must still reckon with China’s possible use of nuclear weapons directly against the United States. U.S. NMD deployment would act to mitigate the political utility of this threat.

This concern is linked to the first two. NMD would moderate Pentagon defense planners’ concerns over escalation in the event of U.S. intervention in Taiwan or other U.S.-China regional conflicts. NMD capability would also add enormously to these planners’ perceptions of policy flexibility on many issues, including Taiwan. China would, they reason, perceive its coercive influence over the United States to have diminished, and the United States would thus have an expanded freedom to maneuver.

(Wade Huntley <huntley@nautilus.org> and Robert Brown <rbrown@nautilus.org> are program director and program assistant for the Global Peace and Security Program at the Nautilus Institute.)

Sources for More Information

Websites and Organizations

The Acronym Institute
http://www.acronym.org.uk/

ACT Online Edition
http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/act.html

Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies
http://www.apcss.org/pub.html

Asia Today
http://www.asiasource.org/news/at_mp_01.cfm

Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html

BASIC
http://www.basicint.org/

Bellona Foundation
http://www.bellona.no/imaker/

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://www.bullatomsci.org/

Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project: What’s New
http://www.ceip.org/programs/npp/nppnew.htm

Center for Defense Information
http://www.cdi.org/

The Center for Strategic & International Studies
http://www.csis.org/

DefenseLINK—Official Website of the U.S. Department of Defense
http://www.defenselink.mil/

“East Asian Regional Security Futures: Theater Missile Defense Implications”
Conference Report and Papers
http://www.nautilus.org/nukepolicy/tmd-conference/index.html

Federation of American Scientists
http://www.fas.org/

Global Beat
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/

Global Peace & Security Program
The Nautilus Institute
http://www.nautilus.org/security/

Jane’s Information Group Home Page
http://www.janes.com/

Mainland Affairs Council
http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/

National Bureau of Asian Research
http://www.nbr.org/

People’s Daily
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/home.html

Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council
http://www.ransac.org/

Security in the Asia-Pacific Region
A List of Sources
http://russia.shaps.hawaii.edu/security/

Taiwan Communique
http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/

United States Institute of Peace Highlights
http://www.usip.org/usip.html

FROM MAD TO NUTS
By William D. Hartung, World Policy Institute

(Editor's Note: A major focus of FPIF's new initiative, called The Republican Rule, will be to track—and to help stop—the entrenchment of the military-industrial complex. As William Hartung, a member of FPIF's advisory committee, notes, the modernization of this complex of weapons profiteering is increasingly driven by plans for an ambitious national missile defense system that has frightening domestic and international implications. We include below Hartung's analysis of the corporate-driven missile defense system. Further analysis by Hartung and others on the military budget is found on the FPIF's Republican Rule webpage:
http://www.fpif.org/republicanrule/commentary_body.html)

Foreign policy issues were mostly an afterthought during the 2000 presidential campaign, and they continue to take a back seat in President George W. Bush’s discussions of the priorities of his administration. But one critical foreign policy issue—U.S. nuclear weapons policy—demands immediate attention and debate. The Bush foreign policy team is quietly contemplating radical changes in U.S. strategy that could set off a global nuclear arms race that will make the U.S.-Soviet competition of the cold war period look tame by comparison.

In his only significant public pronouncement on the subject, delivered last spring, Bush put forward a schizophrenic view of the nuclear conundrum. On the positive side, he spoke of making unilateral cuts in U.S. nuclear forces and taking those forces off of hair-trigger alert. He even implied that the cold war doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD—the doctrine that spurred the U.S. and the Soviet Union to build thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons as a way of ensuring that neither side would dare attack the other for fear of being annihilated in return) was a “dead relic” of a bygone era. On the negative side of the ledger, Bush endorsed the deployment of a massive missile defense program on the scale of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan, complete with interceptor missiles based on land, at sea, in the air, and in outer space.

The seeming contradiction in the Bush view—taking reassuring steps by reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal and taking forces off of alert on the one hand, while provoking other nuclear powers with a massive Star Wars program on the other—disappears if you look at the common thread uniting these proposals: nuclear unilateralism.

Spurred on by the ideological rantings of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a powerful bloc within the Republican Party has increasingly come to treat negotiated arms control arrangements—like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and II), and the proposed Comprehensive Test Ban treaty—as obstacles to U.S. supremacy rather than guarantors of a fragile but critical level of stability in the nuclear age. The right-wing rallying cry is “peace through strength, not peace through paper.” If that means shredding two decades of international arms control agreements (most of which were negotiated by Republican presidents), so be it.

This unilateralist approach to nuclear strategy is a disaster waiting to happen. Bush advisers like Stephen Hadley have suggested that the U.S. can significantly reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons in its current arsenal of 8,000 to 10,000 strategic warheads. Simultaneously, the U.S. would need to modernize the force by developing low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used for missions like destroying hardened underground command centers or hidden weapons facilities.

The barely concealed premise of this emerging nuclear doctrine is a desire to make U.S. nuclear weapons more usable. This dubious proposition is grounded in the notion that a low-yield weapon could more readily be used as a threat, or actually dropped on a target, without sparking nuclear retaliation by another nuclear power. Some conservative analysts have even suggested that low-yield nukes are a “humanitarian” weapon, claiming that they can be used to take out underground biological warfare laboratories, for example, with less loss of life than would result from other approaches to destroying such facilities!

Of course, in the unfortunate event of a nuclear exchange prompted by a U.S. threat to use “mini-nukes,” the Bush doctrine would trust in our spiffy new Star Wars system to protect us. The fact that such a system is far from reality and may never successfully be built does not seem to cool the passions of the new generation of nuclear use theorists (or NUTs, as some critics have called them).

Perhaps the scariest aspect of this new doctrine of making nuclear weapons more usable is that the Bush administration is going to try to sell it to the American public as a forward-looking, responsible approach to nuclear arms control. Because it will entail reductions in the numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, it will be presented as a step forward from the nuclear gridlock of the Clinton/Gore administration, a fallow period during which not a single significant nuclear arms reduction agreement was negotiated. The fact that it might provoke nuclear buildups in Russia and China, ratchet up the nascent nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, terrify our European allies, and reduce the stigma attached to the use of nuclear weapons will be waved aside by the Bush spin control team as “old thinking” on the part of arms control ideologues who are mired in the past.

At least one sector of American society will benefit from this dangerous new doctrine. Weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin (which runs the Sandia nuclear weapons engineering laboratory in New Mexico and builds Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles) will profit handsomely from Bush’s Orwellian approach to reducing the numbers of old nuclear weapons in the field, while investing heavily in the development and deployment of new nukes. The big four weapons contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW—will reap billions in taxpayer funds to build the Bush version of Star Wars, which could cost as much as $240 billion over a ten- to fifteen-year period.

As for the rest of us, we need to raise our voices now to demand real nuclear disarmament, not the bait-and-switch approach offered by the Bush administration. It’s not like we haven’t been through this before. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 with guns blazing, pushing for a new generation of nuclear weapons and a Star Wars system. By the end of his second term, however, he had put Star Wars on the shelf and signed on to two major nuclear arms reduction treaties, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Reagan’s historic reversal came as a direct result of pressure brought to bear by the nuclear freeze campaign, the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END), and pressures from European allies and our erstwhile adversaries in Moscow, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It will take a similar international outcry to stop Bush’s reckless nuclear doctrine. The sooner we get started, the safer we’ll be.

(William D. Hartung <hartung@newschool.edu> is the president’s fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University and a military affairs adviser to Foreign Policy in Focus.)

III. Letters and Comments

CONGO: UNSETTLING EVENTS & ANALYSIS

(Editor's Note: The article referred to below was excerpted in the last issue of the Progressive Response, and was taken by the editor from an FPIF policy brief published last year. The entire policy brief, in which Turner does have more to say, can be found at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol5/v5n10congo.html)

Thomas Turner's article breaks off abruptly, with an unsettling effect. He begins by saying that the way has been opened for an international 'peacekeeping' intervention, and that the U.S. has a responsibility to act—but the article ends without saying how the U.S. should fulfill that responsibility. The logical implication is that the U.S. should constitute a peace-keeping force.

We should bear in mind that the murder of Patrice Lumumba—which Turner rightly deplores—occurred under the auspices of a previous 'peacekeeping' intervention. We need to ask, therefore, how an intervention today would have to be structured so as to be something other than an instrument of imperialist domination.

We also need to ask how the interjection of yet another allegedly 'peacekeeping' force (along with those from Namibia, Uganda, etc.) could be prevented from becoming yet another party to the war.

If we don't ask these questions, but only talk about 'U.S. responsibility,' we run the risk of inadvertently authorizing a repeat of the U.S. operation in Somalia.

My own very tentative idea is that it is best to keep the French, U.S., and other imperialist militaries out of Africa, but to provide joint (rather than rival) support to the development of a real African peacekeeping force. The 'joint' part is the problem, of course—both because of the continued France-U.S. struggle for influence in Africa, and because of the national/ethnic struggles among African nations for dominance.

I wish Turner had had more to say about this!

—John Berg <jberg@world.std.com>

Several readers rightly pointed out the slip in the last issue of the Progressive Response in which an essay was wrongly attributed. The author of the article on corporate democracy, a version of which appeared in the Texas Observer, was written by James K. Galbraith not by John Kenneth Galbraith.

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IRC
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Editor, Progressive Response
Co-director, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: tom@irc-online.org

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Martha Honey
Co-director, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: ipsps@igc.apc.org

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