Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
relevant that it was President Clinton’s own party in Congress which denied him fast-track negotiating authority on trade agreements. By contrast, President George W. Bush in his election campaign proposed an approach to American foreign and security policy which he termed ‘a distinctly American internationalism’ that involved ‘realism in the service of American ideals’. He affirmed that ‘America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom – and gains the most when democracy advances’. It was difficult to detect isolationism in any of that. Nor has there been any isolationism in the actions of the new administration, which has reaffirmed its commitment to the defence of Europe, proposed expansion of NATO to include the Baltic states, sought a new realistic relationship with Russia and advanced the idea of a vast free trade area covering North and South America. And in pursuit of the war against terrorism, President Bush has invested huge efforts and demonstrated great skill in assembling an international coalition to achieve America’s objectives.
What most of the conservative critics of America’s overseas engagements in the Clinton years were concerned about was the need to place national interest alongside, or ahead of, wider objectives. I disagreed with some of these critics on specific matters; but they were right to be concerned, and nine out of ten of them could not fairly be labelled ‘isolationist’.
I too was anxious about the second temptation that faced – and must always face – American foreign policy-makers, namely that of ubiquitous intervention in pursuit of ill-defined goals. My concern was not, of course, that America would become too powerful, but rather that it might dissipate its power, and eventually lose the essential popular mandate for the use of power.
How, where and on what criteria should the American superpower and its allies intervene? We should resist pressure to set out inflexible rules in these matters: one of the marks of sensible statecraft is to recognise that each crisis is qualitatively different from another and requires its own response. But acknowledging that fact makes clarity of strategic thinking even more important: it is in unknown territory that you most need a compass. This is amply borne out by experience of the interventions which America and her allies have undertaken since the end of the Cold War.
The Gulf War against Iraq, in whose preparation I was involved, seemed to many at the time to represent the shape of things to come. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the early morning of 2 August 1990 would probably never have occurred at the height of the Cold War. Moscow would have prevented such reckless adventurism by any of its dependants. But it is equally certain that there would never during the Cold War years have been a unanimous decision of the UN Security Council to back the use of force against Saddam, particularly when ‘force’ involved a US-led operation in the Middle East.*
These were the circumstances in which President George Bush Sr delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress on 11 September, which introduced a new expression to the lexicon of international policy analysts. The purpose of the President’s speech was to rally support for the operation in the Gulf and its objectives, which he spelt out as follows:
Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait completely, immediately and without condition. Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored. The security and stability of the Persian Gulf must be assured. And American citizens must be protected.
So far so good – indeed, excellent.
But the President went on:
A new partnership of nations has begun and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times … a new world order can emerge. A new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. [Emphasis added]
So the ‘New World Order’ was born.
As I have already noted in the context of remarks by President Havel, this sort of stuff makes me nervous. President Bush, like any leader in time of war, was justified in raising the rhetorical temperature. But anyone who really believes that a ‘new order’ of any kind is going to replace the disorderly conduct of human affairs, particularly the affairs of nations, is likely to be severely disappointed, and others with him.
In fact, one of the first purposes to which I committed myself in the period after I left Downing Street (and after Saddam Hussein was left in power in Baghdad) was to throw some cold water on the ambitious internationalism which the Gulf War spawned. So, for example, speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in November 1991, I did not dispute that a new state of affairs had emerged as a result of the fall of Soviet communism and the advance of democracy and free enterprise – 1 did not even quibble with the expression ‘New World Order’. But I also urged caution. I recalled the eerily similar language about ‘New World Orders’ which characterised diplomatic discussions between the two World Wars, and I quoted General Smuts’ epitaph on the League of Nations: ‘What was everybody’s business in the end proved to be nobody’s business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressors got away with it.’
Had I been less tactful, I might have added that Saddam Hussein also ‘got away with it’ – at least to the extent that he was still causing trouble in Baghdad while President Bush and I were writing our memoirs.
There were important lessons to be learned from the Gulf War, but only some were absorbed at the time, and some wrong conclusions were also drawn. In one important way, the campaign against Saddam turned out to be untypical of post-Cold War conflicts. The degree of consensus about military action was the result of a temporary and fortuitous series of conditions. Once Russia and China became more assertive, the UN Security Council was unlikely to be an effective forum for dealing with serious crises. Equally untypical was the fact that Saddam Hussein had managed to unite most of the Muslim nations against him. Much as he tried, he was thus never able to rely on anti-Western feeling to provide him with useful allies. Saddam was a blunderer. But as a rule in the post-Cold War world it was more likely that events would follow Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘Clash of civilisations’, where opposing religions and cultures wrestled for dominance, than Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of ‘the End of History’, where democracy was the inevitable global victor.*
The real lessons of the Gulf had nothing to do with New World Orders but a lot to do with the fundamental requirements for successful interventions. It was the decisiveness of American leadership under President Bush and the superiority of American military technology which ensured the defeat of Saddam. America’s allies – particularly Britain and France – helped. Diplomatic efforts to keep the coalition together were also valuable. But American power and the resolution to apply it won the war – and they could have won the peace too, if excessive concern for international opinion had not prevented America’s demanding the complete disarmament of Iraqi forces.
What the Gulf War really demonstrated was the necessity of American leadership. But this was not to everyone’s liking – not even, one suspects, entirely to the liking of the US State Department. Multilateralism – in effect, the use of force only under the authority of the United Nations and for international purposes – became almost an obsession in the years that followed.
It is worth recalling just how much of a contrast this was with earlier American interventions. Under President Reagan the actions against the regimes in Grenada in 1983 and Libya in 1986 were unashamed exertions of American power in defence of American and broader Western interests.* Nor had President Bush shown before the Gulf War any inclination to break away from this formula. When on 20 December 1989 the United States overthrew the government of General Noriega in Panama it acted decisively against a drug-trafficking thug who had apparently been planning attacks on American citizens and who was implicitly threatening vital American interests in the Panama Canal. It was a large operation involving twenty-six thousand US troops and it provoked an international outcry – I was almost alone among other heads of government in voicing