Wars of Revelation by Rebecca Lissner

Author:Rebecca Lissner [Lissner, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Prewar Assessment of U.S. National Power

Prior to the Gulf War, the Bush administration struggled to define the purpose of American power in a world that had moved beyond Cold War rivalries. In March 1989, Scowcroft wrote to the president, “You will, in due course, need to lay out a vision of American power. . . . We need to establish the principle that American power is not simply a reaction to Soviet military capability.”47 The administration was anxious to avoid the mistake of post–World War II, as well as post-Vietnam, demobilization, not to mention post–World War I isolationism.48 The Europeanists on the NSC staff came up with the tagline “commonwealth of free nations,” which appeared in a few presidential speeches.49 Others in the White House had thrown around the idea of “sustainment,” but the Pentagon objected—perhaps “assurance” or “preserving a framework for peace” would be better, senior defense official Scooter Libby suggested. Acknowledging the inadequacy of these suggestions, he conceded: “Replacing ‘containment’ is in the end a very difficult task.”50 The terminological muddle gestures at a deeper conceptual confusion that plagued the Bush administration during this period. After decades of seeking the downfall of the Evil Empire, it was not clear for what else U.S. power could or should be used.

Moreover, in 1989 and 1990, it appeared that the United States would operate within a system that was at least somewhat multipolar. Moscow was clearly diminishing, but American allies seemed on the ascendance, placing a premium on cooperative diplomacy and economic exchange. Europe was a “rising economic superpower,”51 a reunified Germany would only grow in economic and political heft, Japan seemed to be re-emerging as a great power, and “Asian Tiger” economies were rising.52 It appeared the global balance of power was “shifting . . . among industrial democracies.”53 The Bush administration proclaimed that “the rise of other centers of power in the free world is . . . welcome” and called on allies and friends to assume a greater share of global leadership.

Stability and balance were paramount in such a world.54 The 1990 NSS prescribed a grand strategy intended to “preserve the international equilibrium.”55 President Bush, when asked to identify NATO’s greatest post-Soviet adversary, responded: “The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability.”56 Even at a regional level, strategic ends rested on the maintenance of “stable regional military balances.”57 Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski identified the contours of this nascent grand strategic outlook in a June 1989 Washington Post piece: “[The Bush Administration is pursuing a] grand strategy that would shape a more cooperative world order in which America remains the essential balancer and key source of stability.”58 Washington could not yet imagine a unipolar international system that derived its stability from the very absence of a power balance.59 Instead, the future order envisioned by this grand strategy was a multipolar one, at least economically and diplomatically.60

This vision of multipolarity rested on the notion that it was economic and diplomatic power, rather than military power, that would matter most in this emerging global order.

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