One of Barack Obama’s advisers(fn1) on national security issues, Philip H. Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Council staffer during the Clinton administration, published an article in the winter 2007-08 issue of Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (fn2). He argued that America’s strategy against terror is failing
because the Bush administration chose to wage the wrong war.
The Bush record is six years of failure, according to Gordon, because of a misdiagnosis of the origins of the problem, too much faith in military force and belligerent rhetoric, alienating friends and allies, conflating America’s foes into a single ‘enemy’, and misunderstanding the ideological fundamentals of the struggle.
More over the fold...
Gordon’s article is behind a subscription/pay-per-view wall, but for those who are at universities or institutes with a subscription, it is available here. For anyone else, you’re probably better off buying his book Winning the Right War, of which the article is an extract, since you can get it from Amazon for the same price as buying the article.
In the latest issue of Survival, former Bush speechwriter and Deputy Assistant to the President Peter Wehner and Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, comment on Gordon’s arguments, followed by a response from Gordon. Wehner makes an eloquent and robust defence of the Bush administration policy and record. Mahbubani offers a sophisticated perspective from the non-Western world, agreeing with Gordon in his general thrust but concludes that
If America could once again being thinking and acting strategically, many of its problems with the world, including with the Islamic world, could be resolved fairly easily. The strategic thinking of shrewd geopolitical analysts like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski enabled America to win the Cold War without firing a shot. With the right diplomatic stance, America could achieve similar success with the new strategic challenge it faces.
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America could also use a reminder that diplomacy was invented three thousand years ago not to enable countries to talk to their friends and allies – no diplomatic immunity is needed when meeting friends. Rather, diplomacy was invented to enable states to talk to their adversaries. Hence, if America wants to discover the wisdom of traditional strategic thinkers, it should establish diplomatic relations with its adversaries, particularly Iran.
Gordon’s conclusion in his reply to Wehner and Mahbubani gives some insight into the approach he would recommend to a putative Obama administration (or to any new administraton, for that matter):
In discussing trends in Iraq and elsewhere, Wehner points out evidence of Muslims turning on the extremists in their midst and increasingly rejecting suicide bombing as a justifiable tactic. Like Wehner (and in a way Mahbubani as well), I think these are important developments and that they point the way to a more hopeful future. Al-Qaeda has no positive vision to offer, its tactics are tarnishing the reputation of Muslims everywhere, and it is killing fellow Muslims and civilians all over the world. In the long run, this is not an approach likely to win broad-based support; on the contrary, unless we artificially prolong its life, it will in time be seen as the nihilistic and coun¬terproductive strategy that it is. All this leads me to recommend the grand strategy that I spell out in Winning the Right War: contain the threat through intelligence, judicial, police and sometimes military means; address the diplomatic, economic and social sources of frustration in the Muslim world; re-establish America’s squandered moral authority and the appeal of US society; engage allies and adversaries alike diplomatically; and seek to diminish our dependence on imported oil which is as bad for oil exporters as it is for us. If we do all that, and stop playing into the extremists’ hands, I believe we can have the same sort of success we had the last time we faced a long-term, ideological threat, during the Cold War. And Islamist extremism will end up on the same ash-heap of history that Communism did.
The full debate is available free-to-view here.
The same issue contains an article by Michael O’Hanlon (a Clinton adviser and a man many Kossacks love to hate) on Resurrecting the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. This, and the rest of the issue, are also free to view. The next issue (April-May) will have an article by another Obama adviser, Bruce Riedel (also a Senior Fellow at Brookings and former NSC staffer) on a decade of nuclear standoff in South Asia.
Disclaimers:
(1) Just because someone has policy advisers doesn’t mean they necessarily take that advice.
(2) I am the Managing Editor of Survival and thus have an interest in getting you to read this piece. We publish a lot that Kossacks interested in foreign policy will find useful, but I don’t normally post about it as it’s all behind the subscription wall. But since this content is free, and given the interest in the Obama candidacy everywhere (but especially at this site) I thought it would be worthwhile to bring it to the community’s attention. I did this once before, when Jerome a Paris published an essay with us. In future issues we will be making our lead article free-to-view, and I will post diaries about them if relevant to this community, unless I get feedback that this would constitute inappropriate promotion. Personally I’ve argued for taking out paid ads on the site, but our marketing people have decided that funds would be more effectively spent elsewhere.