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The Elliott School of International Affairs
The George Washington University
October 30, 2002

What Should be America's Strategy in the New World of Terror?

John Mearsheimer and Henry Nau discuss American grand strategy

The following text is a portion of a discussion between Professors John Mearsheimer and Henry Nau that took place on 30 October 2002 at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Each professor explained his unique theory for international relations, and they debated America's foreign policy in the light of 11 September. Harry Harding, the dean of the Elliott School, moderated the event.

John Mearsheimer, Ph.D., is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and he recently published The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W.W. Norton and Company, 2001). Henry Nau, Ph.D., is a professor of political science and international affairs Elliott School, and his most recent book is At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2002).

Harry Harding (HH): The topic of our conversation tonight is going to illustrate the importance of linking theory, history, and practice. And our two speakers are ideally qualified to start the conversation with you.

The United States is engaged today in one of the most significant debates over its international posture in many decades, in fact arguably in its entire history. This is not simply a debate over foreign policy. To be sure, many important foreign policy issues are on our political agenda this election year: our policy towards Iraq, which is front and center, our policy towards terrorism, our policy towards North Korea, our policy towards China, towards Latin America, towards European integration, towards the Middle East, towards economic development, and towards international trade and investment. All of these foreign policy issues are important and they're being discussed extensively.

But the debate goes far beyond this. It is also a debate over America's grand strategy in the present historical era. This raises a broader set of longer-range and comprehensive issues. What is the basic character of the international system in the post-Cold War era? What should American long-term objectives be in that international system? And what should our strategy be as we try to advance those objectives effectively and at acceptable cost?

Now, such a discussion cannot be fruitfully undertaken without a deep immersion in theory. This is sometimes difficult to explain to our students, who often prefer to be atheoretical. But in fact, you cannot discuss these issues without a keen awareness of theory. Without a sense of theory, one cannot adequately analyze the nature of the international system. You don't know what questions to ask about it. You aren't able to generalize about it. You aren't able to make assessments of its future evolution. And without theory, one is unable effectively to talk about strategy because basically strategy assumes a knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships. If the United States does X, the rest of the world will respond in a certain way. And those if-then causal statements also demand a very rigorous understanding of theory. The debate over grand strategy today is therefore, in part, a debate over international relations theory.

And it is a more complicated debate than many people imagine. It is not just a debate between realists and liberals, between those who believe in the importance of power and those who believe in the importance of international interdependence and international institutions. It is also equally significantly within the realist community itself, about the resources that are crucial to the competition for power and about the prospects for continued American dominance in the evolving international order.

The debate over grand strategy is also a debate over history. It's a debate over how to identify the contending tendencies in the evolution of American diplomacy, not just since 1945, and not just since 1898, but indeed since the very origins of the American republic in 1789. What have been the enduring alternatives that American leaders and American publics have debated and considered, and what has their relative weight been?

So, it's this context-the linkage of theory and history to the current debate over grand strategy-that is going to inform our discussion tonight. Indeed, an exploration of those linkages lies at the heart of the Elliott School's mission as a professional school of international affairs. And as I mentioned a minute ago, I can imagine no better-qualified people to start the conversation than John Mearsheimer and Henry Nau.

John Mearsheimer (JM): It is a pleasure to be here on the dais with Henry and Harry. And I greatly appreciate the fact that everybody came out on a cold and wet night like this to hear me talk. I never cease to be amazed that people are this interested in hearing what I have to say. But I must say that I'm glad that is the case.

Let me start by telling you why I think grand strategy is an interesting and important topic at this time. During the Cold War, we established a particular order on top of a very simple bipolar structure. This order included institutions like NATO, the American-Japanese and the American-South Korean alliances, and so forth and so on. You're all familiar with the Cold War order that was built on top of that Cold War structure.

What happened in 1990 is that the Cold War structure was demolished. The Soviet Union, as you all know, went down the toilet bowl, and we were left with one superpower in the world, the United States. What usually happens in international politics when a particular structure changes is that the order that was created in response to it changes as well. But that didn't happen in this case, in large part because of the brilliant diplomacy--and I mean this seriously-of the first Bush administration, and especially the Clinton administration. The United States was able to keep the Cold War order intact without the Cold War. We kept NATO alive in the absence of the Soviet threat. One of our main goals during the Cold War was to get our European and Asian allies to behave like the Stepford wives. We were very successful in that regard, and that success continued through the 1990s. We told them to jump and their only question was, how high? And we liked that situation for all the obvious reasons.

But, as a result of September 11, it seems that the Cold War order, which was living a tenuous existence in the absence of the Cold War structure, has begun to come unglued. I think the best indicator of that change is just how uppity the Germans have recently been toward the United States. Of course, the United States just can't understand this behavior. Again, we expect the Germans, the French, and the British-maybe not so much the French, but the Germans and the British for sure-to behave like the Stepford wives. Who are these Germans to be telling us that they won't go along with our policies? What is going on here is that the Cold War order is finally beginning to collapse. A lot of this has to do with the Bush administration's foreign policy, but a lot of it is due to the fact that the Soviet Union is gone and we're now engaged in a war on terrorism.

So, we are in a very fluid situation and there is a lot of change coming down the road for US foreign policy. Of course we are like blind men and blind women trying to figure out what the new world will look like, or, what it should look like.

What I want to do is give you my take on what American grand strategy should look like in the next few years, if not the next few decades. My view at a general level is that the United States should strive to remain the preponderant power in the international system. We should strive to remain the number one state in the world. Number two, we should go to great lengths to crush al Qaeda-which means we must find al Qaeda and destroy it. I think that we have no choice on that matter; winning the war on terrorism is an imperative for the United States

However, I believe that the United States can achieve these goals--remaining number one and tracking down al Qaeda--by spending a lot less money on defense and also by significantly reducing the American military's footprint around the world. I tend to agree with the hawks in the Bush administration on what should be the basic goals of the United States. Where I disagree is on how we should achieve those goals. There seems to be a tendency among the hawks to argue that we should increase America's footprint around the globe, rely more on military force, and spend inordinate amounts of money on defense, all for the purpose of remaining the most powerful state in the system and for winning the war on terrorism. I think that's not the right way to proceed.

Let me be more specific and unpack my argument. Let me do it by stating what I think are the three principal American foreign policy goals, i.e., what should be the principal concerns of the United States down the road. Number one is remaining the preponderant great power. Number two is counter-proliferation. Here I think that the war against Iraq that we may fight, the question of how to deal with North Korea, and the question of how to deal with Iran-all members of the axis of evil-are really all about counter-proliferation. Number three is counter-terrorism. In short, it's great-power politics, counter-proliferation, and counter-terrorism. And let me briefly give you my take on each of these matters.

I believe that what was said in the Bush administration's recent "National Security Strategy" about how the United States would go to great lengths to maintain itself as the number one state on the face of the earth is nothing new. What is new is that we actually said it. No leader should say this when in office, especially at this point in time, when the United States is trying to woo allies and fence-sitters into supporting its foreign policy agenda. The fact that we are number one is clear to everybody, as is the fact that we sometimes behave ruthlessly. But you don't want to rub people's noses in it. And that's what the Bush administration is doing when it stands on the rooftops and announces to the world that we are number one and we plan to keep it that way.

Still, the fact is that the United States worked very hard in the nineteenth century to establish hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and then we spent the twentieth century making sure that we did not have a peer competitors, in other words, a rival great power that dominated its region of the world. There were four potential peer competitors over the course of the last century: Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. All four of them are now in the dustbin of history, and the United States played a key role in putting them there. The United States has no intention of letting any other state dominate its region of the world the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere. It is not acceptable to us. That is what being number one in the world means. It is not being a global hegemon. China, Russia, Japan-we are never going to dominate those countries the way we dominate countries in the Western Hemisphere. We are not going to be a global hegemon. What we are and what we are going to continue to be is a regional hegemon that goes to great lengths to prevent other regional hegemons from emerging in places like Europe and Asia.

Now, if you look at the future, there's only one country that stands a chance of becoming a peer competitor, and that is China. Almost all of our traditional rivals, like Japan and Russia, are depopulating and are not going to be serious competitors down the road. The balance of power in the twenty-first century looks very promising for the United States. China is the only possible challenger. The question you have to ask yourself is: what will the United States do if China reaches the point where it might be able to dominate Asia? My argument is that we will deal with China the way we dealt with Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the former Soviet Union. We will go to great lengths to contain China and make sure that it does not replicate what we did in the Western Hemisphere. But China is not in a position today, indeed, it is not close to being in a position today where it can dominate Asia. It is not on the threshold of becoming the equivalent of the United States. Therefore, we can sit back and relax. In short, there is no great power out there at this point in time that is a serious threat to the United States.

We come now to counter-proliferation, which is a subject that is in the news these days because of Iraq and North Korea. Here is the basic problem we face. As the United States has become an extremely-and I'm choosing my words carefully here-an extremely powerful country, and as it has shown that it is willing to use military force for political purposes, it has created powerful incentives for all of our potential foes to get nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are a wonderful deterrent. That's why the United States has them. Many people like to argue that Saddam Hussein is misguided for wanting nuclear weapons. He's not. If you were Saddam Hussein and the United States had its crosshairs on you, you would want nuclear weapons too. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly reported that when he was told by the North Koreans that they had a nuclear program, they said something to the effect, "You put us on the axis of evil, you have American forces on our border; and you're constantly threatening to attack us. What do you expect?"

So the problem we face is that our aggressive behavior around the globe creates powerful incentives for other states to acquire nuclear weapons. Now the question is: can we prevent those states from acquiring nuclear weapons by using military force? It's seems clear that you are not going to be able to do it with economic sanctions or diplomacy. You may do a bit on the margins, but these states are hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons and if you're going to stop it you are probably going to have to conquer and occupy them. My view is that you may be able to do this one time-you may be able to start a general war on the Korean peninsula-but you're probably not going to do it a second time, or want to do it a second time. The problem that you face if you go after Korea or Iraq, is that you send a signal to every other state in the system that thinks it might be on the axis of evil somewhere down the road, that it better go out and get nuclear weapons. Furthermore, you are going to create a giant mess when you start a war. A war on the Korean peninsula is not going to be pretty. A war against Iraq may be easier but it too is probably going to be a big mess, especially the aftermath. So it looks like it is going to be very tough to do counter-proliferation over the long term. Are we really going to fight against Iran to prevent proliferation? Are we going to finish with Iraq, then go after Iran, and then North Korea-three major wars? I don't think you are going get the American people to sign up for that.

What I think is going to happen on the proliferation front is that the United States will go to considerable lengths to make sure that it does everything possible diplomatically and economically to prevent nuclear proliferation. But its efforts will fall short in most cases and it will learn to live with nuclear proliferation over the long term. That is probably the correct path, although it is not a desirable outcome. In the best of all possible worlds, realists like me want only one country to have nuclear weapons-that's the United States. If I could take every other state's nuclear weapons away, except ours, I would do it in a second. But we can't do that. Which brings us to the question: do you want to fight an endless series of wars to prevent nuclear proliferation? I don't want to do that. So I think we're going to have to learn to live with proliferation.

That brings us to the third task, counter-terrorism. I think that the best way to fight the war on terrorism is not with military force, but with what I would call a "hearts and mind" strategy. I think that the taproot of the terrorism problem is that huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world hate us. Therefore, many of those people are willing to support al Qaeda, with different levels of intensity for sure. Furthermore, there is almost an endless supply of people in the Arab and Islamic world who want to join al Qaeda. And if you look at the demographic projections for the Arab and Islamic world, the situation is frightening. People in that world are having lots of babies, which means there will be lots of people out there who are angry with us, and lots of them will be coming after us. We have got to rectify that problem. And in my opinion the way you do that is by winning hearts and minds.

Now, what exactly do I mean? First, I think we have to reduce our military footprint in the Arab and Islamic world and around the globe more generally. We have to get out of people's faces and stop trying to tell them how to do their business. We should have learned this during the Cold War, but unfortunately, we didn't. So I would reduce America's military footprint in the world.

Furthermore, I would not use military force to wage the war on terrorism, except as a last resort, and then I would use it very judiciously. There are two reasons for this approach. To start, terrorists do not make good targets for the US military. This is not like going after an adversary with armor division equivalents or aircraft carriers. Terrorists are small bands of men and sometimes women who melt away when we target them. So they don't make good targets for conventional military forces.

But that is not the most important reason you don't want to use military force against terrorists if you can avoid it. The key reason is that you are, in effect, using force against people in the Arab and Islamic world, and you are creating the impression in their minds that we in the West take pleasure in beating up Muslims. It is widely believed in the Arab and Islamic world that we think that way. If we go into Iraq, for example, and then we invade Iran, it would enrage huge numbers of people who are already very angry at us, provide more recruits and support for al Qaeda, and make it more difficult over time to win the war against terrorism.

The final point I'd make about winning hearts and minds is that we have to change a number of policies in the Middle East. We have to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia for sure. I argued in the early 1990s that we were wrong to leave them there; I would have taken them out after the first Gulf War. But much more importantly, we have to do something about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea that the United States can support the Sharon government as it continues to build a greater Israel--which effectively means taking the West Bank and the Gaza strip away from the Palestinians--and at the same time win hearts and minds in the Arab world, is simply wrong-headed. I am not in favor of abandoning Israel, selling Israel down the river, or anything of that sort. But I think that the United States-if it wants to win the war on terrorism-has to adopt a more even-handed policy toward that conflict, and we have got to go considerable lengths to try to shut it down, even though that will be very difficult to do. Here I take my hat off to the Clinton administration for at least making a serious effort on that front. The Bush administration, in contrast, has washed its hands of the problem, which I think is a huge mistake.

So in terms of grand strategy, I think the United States has to remain the most powerful state on the globe and on that front that our only potential threat is China. But it is a distant threat and therefore we can relax. With regard to nuclear proliferation, in an ideal world I would stop the Iranians, the Iraqis, and the North Koreans from acquiring nuclear weapons if I could. I don't think you can do that, however, and I think the idea of fighting endless wars to prevent proliferation is not going to work. Finally, with regard to the war on terrorism, I think that the heavy-handed use of military force, increasing America's military footprint around the world, and supporting the Sharon government as it attempts to create a greater Israel, are all fundamentally mistaken policies. Instead, we ought to concentrate on winning hearts and minds in the Arab and Islamic world.

Henry Nau (HN): I love to listen to John Mearsheimer. I really do. I mean John is an extraordinary advocate of a way of looking at the world, which is important, terribly important, and I think we ignore it at our own peril. But, I would say that at the end of your comments, John, you talk about a world in which we are going to have an increasing number of nuclear states, a world in which we clearly are going to face terror, potentially from a greater and greater number, as you suggested, of dissatisfied people and mostly Muslims around the world. And yet somehow or other we are going to deal with that world by diplomacy alone, or primarily. We are going to deal with that world by solving the Arab-Israeli dispute and somehow or other winning the hearts and minds of the people of the world. I think at the end it sounds like you have departed a long way from the realist perspective, and probably even a long way from the realist perspective such as I think about it.

Now let me spend just a moment doing just that. That is, suggesting how I look at the world from a realist perspective, and then what the implications of that framework are for my views of American grand strategy and American policy in the current situation. I start with some very familiar realist assumptions, as John does. The world is anarchic; there is no central authority. As I tell my students in International Affairs 005, there is no world 911. Thus, states have to survive by self-help and by arming themselves. And, because those arms always can have offensive as well as defensive purposes, states can never be sure about the intentions of other states. Hence, it makes sense to think that more arms and more power are always better than less in order to protect your security, in order to protect your survival. Up to this point, I agree very much with John's approach, which is developed in great detail in his book along those lines.

But then I go on to ask a further question. I ask the question: States seek to survive to be sure, but they seek to survive as what? Realists define survival as territorial integrity and autonomy of domestic political systems. But survival, I would argue, also has to do with the content, not just the autonomy, of domestic political systems. That is, countries seek to survive as a specific type of country, not just as an autonomous piece of territory. Some states seek to survive as democracies; others seek to survive as fundamentalist religious societies-Iran, for example. Still others seek to survive as national cultures; that was the origins of the nation-state in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And still others seek to survive as authoritarian societies, the traditional case in Russia and in China.

Now, this political content of autonomy I call national identity, and by that I mean the values and institutions by which states organize their domestic, political, and economic lives, the incentives by which they mobilize power and legitimate the use of their military and economic power. States seek to survive to protect these identities, not just to protect autonomy to pursue any values and institutions. You and I probably would not support the survival of the United States if in seeking to survive the United States became despotic. And notice how the Soviet people in 1991 did not seek to preserve the autonomous territorial integrity of the old Soviet Union. They no longer supported the specific communist identity of that autonomous territorial unit and they let it die.

National identities, therefore, are, in my view, much more central to the struggle for power than pure realists, like John, concede. They're not epiphenomenal or merely rationalizations of power. They don't come after the facts of power. They actually inspire the facts of power. A national identity creates the interest in survival, which in turn creates the interest in power.

Now, this concept of national identity has two implications for the way the world works. If national identities are very different-if they are very different in content-then the problem of anarchy is even more severe in some cases than realists argue. Because countries that mobilize and legitimate power on different terms are countries that are going to have a very difficult time understanding each other and trusting each other. Take a country for example, such as the United States, which forbids laws and the use of power based on religion. How is it likely to relate, how much trust is it likely to have with respect to a society, such as Iran, which actually bases its law and the use of power in that society on religion? Now, it doesn't mean that two such countries with very different national identities can't get along-you know Churchill once made the famous quip that he would make a pact with the devil in order to defeat Hitler. But, it does mean that they're going to have difficulties understanding each other, trusting each other, and cooperating with each other. And, they're probably going to have to depend upon themselves for their own protection. They won't be able to depend upon each other for such protection, and so they will be more inclined to get involved in an arms race and in the predicaments of anarchy.

On the other hand, if national identities converge or become more similar-countries motivate and legitimate power on similar grounds-this, I would argue, may help them to reduce the traditional distrust of anarchy. And, perhaps if those identities involve norms of peaceful resolution of disputes, eliminate the use of force altogether in their relationships to one another. Now, even with the recent defections of our German friends and the persisting defections of our French friends, this appears to have happened at a much deeper level in relationships among the strong democracies. The major democracies (Group of Seven or, more broadly, most of the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) do not even think about the threat or the use of force to resolve issues among themselves. There is no evidence that I know of that they are thinking about scenarios 10 or 20 years down the line when they in fact might need to use force to resolve some of these issues between them. This is the so-called "democratic peace," and I'll come back to it in a minute. But, when you think about this possibility of converging national identities, a narrowing of identity differences can also temper the struggle for power among non-democracies. We have the examples of the conservative monarchies in the nineteenth century, coming together in the Concert of Europe and in the Holy Alliance, that were able to moderate, to attenuate, at least for a good while in the nineteenth century, the traditional conflicts and tendencies towards war of an anarchic system.

Now, what does all this mean for evaluating US foreign policy today in the context of the war against terror? Looking at American foreign policy from this perspective, US relations break up into three basic groups of countries. The US of course dominates all of these countries in terms of power, so if you think about US relations exclusively in terms of relative power, there is no reason to differentiate among these countries, and, as John suggested, you take a very general approach to all countries in the world in terms of thinking about American grand strategy.

But, when you think about grand strategy or the world also in terms of national identities, and the possibility of converging and diverging national identities, relations between the United States and other countries fall into three groups. First, the US has relations with countries where America's liberal democratic identity strongly converges with the identity of those countries; these are the major industrial democracies, as I noted before, most importantly the G-7 countries. Second, the US has relations with countries whose identities sharply diverge from that of the United States. In this second category, there are three subgroups of countries that we can think about today: 1) terrorists of global reach-they're not actually a country, but a non-state network of cadre and financial supporters. 2) rogue and generally totalitarian states-Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, other such countries; and 3) moderate but authoritarian states-such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and so on. Finally, the US has a third set of relations with countries whose identities are in some stage of transition toward more liberal political and/or economic identities-Latin America, India, Russia, some southeast Asian states, and of course also China (at least in terms of the evolution of its domestic economic identity).

Now the imperatives for US foreign policy, I would argue, are different in each of these three sets of relationships. In the first set, as I mentioned, America faces no military threat whatsoever. It is an unprecedented historical fact. We don't know all the reasons why the democratic peace exists but it is a fact-despite the defection of our allies from time to time on issues that are very, very important to us. Hence, working closely with these countries in my way of thinking about the world is the bedrock or should be the bedrock of American foreign policy.

Now, I say that recognizing that it is very difficult to unite people within a single democracy, let alone to unite countries that are democratic across national boundaries. So I have no illusions about how difficult it is to work with these G-7 countries. But these countries are all strong democracies, and because democracies do not act individually except on the basis of majority rule, democratic nations should also not act without a majority support from other strong democracies. Thus, in my view, the United States should have majority support from the other strong democracies before it acts in the world, especially before it uses major military force Now, notice that I didn't say the US needs unanimity. I don't think we need the support of all seven major democracies. Nor did I say that the United States should not at any time act unilaterally or lead unilaterally. As long as the objective is to achieve in the end a multilateral consensus, the United States is going to have to act aggressively from time to time in a unilateral sense. It's going to be hard to get consensus. It's hard enough in one country; it's going to be very, very hard across boundaries with other major democracies. I expect the United States-or I would urge the United States-to work hard with these countries to try to gain at least a majority coalition before we act decisively in the world and in particularly before we use force in the world. Now notice that I have not said that we must act with UN authority or approval. UN consensus would be nice but more than a half of the UN members are still non-democracies, and I don't see any moral virtue in giving non-democracies a veto over the security and economic interests of democratic nations.

Now what does this imperative to work closely with other G-7 countries mean in terms of dealing with the second group of countries I talked about? First, let me take the terrorists of global reach. Here, I would give the Bush administration actually extremely high marks. They have done, I think, an excellent job of mobilizing an international coalition under general UN authorization to topple the Taliban government and now to begin the long process of trying to stabilize Afghanistan and perhaps-although I am not overly optimistic along these lines-democratize that country.

But now the issue is Iraq and the question is whether or not Iraq is a threat, first of all to these strong democracies and most importantly to the United States. And secondly, whether or not the United States is approaching that problem currently in a way in which it will honor this imperative of working with a majority of other strong democracies. First, is Iraq a threat? I mean this is an issue about which very good people can disagree. For me, the answer is yes and for six basic reasons. Iraq supports terrorism in its own region. That's a known fact for some time, well documented. Secondly, terrorists of global reach originate in large measure out of that region. That is from the Middle East. Thirdly, Iraq seeks weapons of mass destruction. Fourth, Iraq has a nasty habit of invading its neighbor. Fifth, it lives in a part of the world where violence is endemic, where violence surrounds it and other states. And, sixth, its leader Saddam Hussein may be a survivor but he survives by taking risks, big risks. He seems to be willing to put his survival on the line, maybe even indulge a martyr's instinct if the stakes are high enough In that mix of things, I argue it doesn't take much to connect the dots, even without a smoking gun, and conclude that Iraq is in fact connected in a general way to the terrorist threat that has already cost 3000 lives in the United States and may well be capable of deciding at some point to assist terrorists of global reach specifically to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Now secondly, however, is the Bush administration approaching the problem in the right manner? Is it violating my first imperative of working closely with other G-7 countries? My answer is no. It has threatened to act unilaterally, to be sure. But I think it has done so largely in order not to have to act unilaterally. That is, it has done so in order to generate the best possible multilateral outcome that it could possibly generate. Notice that it has never acted unilaterally in a literal sense. We've always had the British on our side. And now George Bush has the US Congress on his side-three-quarters of the US Senate, two-thirds of the US House. And I would venture to predict that within the next couple of weeks, he will also bring on board a number of additional G-7 countries, such as France, and that in fact he will also obtain a satisfactory resolution from the UN Security Council. [Editor's Note: That prediction proved correct as the Bush administration secured in November 2002 a unanimous UNSC resolution to give Iraq one final chance to disarm.] It is interesting that the United States has never used significant military force within the last twenty years without international legitimacy. Those who have made such an outcry about unilateralism should remember that fact. The United States acted in the Persian Gulf War, in the Bosnian War, in the Kosovo War, and in the war against Afghanistan with either UN or NATO approval.

I will leave a discussion of North Korea for the question-and-answer period because many people now argue, "Okay fine, but isn't North Korea even more of a threat because it now has nuclear weapons, and Iraq is only assumed to be trying to get nuclear weapons?" My answer to that is yes and no. I mean, North Korea is a bigger threat to be sure, but in fact, it only reinforces the need to do something about Iraq before Iraq becomes a bigger threat. But, North Korea is also not as big a threat at the moment as Iraq because, while it may do a few of the things Iraq does, it does not do all six things I mentioned earlier that make Iraq a unique threat. It doesn't support terrorism in its region. It hasn't recently invaded its neighbors. And it exists in a part of the world where there is relative stability around it and where most of the countries around it in fact want to contain it.

Now, what about all of the other countries in this second group of US relations with countries whose identities sharply diverge? I'm thinking of the moderate authoritarian states-Egypt, Jordan, etc.? John's suggestion is that we mediate the Arab-Israeli dispute. I agree that that is the most important thing we could do at the moment in the Middle East. I think we need to continue to lead on that issue. But I have the feeling that we are going to have to deal with the balance of military forces in the Middle East before we are going to be able to deal successfully with the peace process in the Middle East. By that, I mean that the extremists have gained ground in the Middle East in almost every country in the region, including also in Israel where the growth of the religious groups that want to annex the West Bank and Gaza has increased over the course of the last ten years. Now, unless we do something about rebalancing the military realities in that part of the world and reducing the influence of the extremists, I doubt any peace agreement could in fact be implemented or would last. And I am almost certain that the peace agreement that we almost had at the end of 2000 would not have lasted beyond a few weeks if that.

But the United States has to keep trying, and I would hope that in the future it tries in a somewhat different way. Because frankly, in leading the Middle East peace negotiations, the United States has acted too unilaterally in my view. It should start to act more in multilateral groups-lead but always through multilateral groups. The Bush administration is actually doing that more, having formed the so-called quartet of countries-the US, EU, UN, and Russia-in order to reach agreement on certain kinds of proposals before they are put forward in the peace process. And also the very wise step which the Bush administration took to pick up the initiative of moderate Arab countries, most importantly Saudi Arabia when it recently made some very helpful proposals. So, The United States should continue to lead the peace process from within, but fold its leadership into multilateral groups on the outside that will facilitate its ability to pressure both of the participants, that is, Arabs and the Israelis, towards greater agreement.

But ultimately, the thing that matters most for these moderate authoritarian countries in much of the third world and particularly in the Muslim world is up to them. Many of them have to make a basic decision and that decision is to secularize and modernize just as Turkey has done. Many of the moderate Muslim countries have not made that decision yet and until they do, there is very little, it seems to me, that the international community or the United States can do for them. On the other hand, if they make this decision, I want the United States to be in a position to lead the world towards opening our markets to the products of those countries. And it so happens that those products are now front and center in the new multilateral trade round which the Bush administration has been successful in starting in Doha, Qatar last year.

Now let me say a final word about the third group of countries-those whose identities are in transition towards greater political and economic liberalization. For these countries, I also think the Doha round is extremely critical. There are two things that we need to do with respect to these countries. We have an unprecedented opportunity to potentially nudge their identities in the direction of this community of democratic peace characterized by the current industrial democracies. And here, I am far more optimistic than a strict realist. I think it is possible over a long period of time to nudge identities in a converging direction and potentially to reduce the suspicions of anarchy. And critical to this objective is to open markets, that is to offer to these countries-particularly China, Russia, India, the Latin American countries-ever greater access to world markets. There are other steps that can be taken, but I give the Bush administration high marks again for bringing about the opening of the Doha round. And I give them about six or twelve months now to make this round pay off. Obviously, after obtaining the trade promotion authority in summer of 2002, the administration is now waiting to see to what extent trade support in Congress changes as a result of the elections here in another week. Hopefully, that support will be strong enough that the US government will be able to more forward aggressively in that round working on products, such as agriculture, textile, pharmaceutical products, and anti-dumping laws that are directly in the interests of these poor countries and of these transition countries.

There are other steps that are necessary in addition to the Doha Round to nudge the identities of transition countries toward greater convergence. These include enlargement of the European Union, which has been stalled for much too long, to reinforce the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe; implementing effectively China's recent entry into the WTO; bringing Russia into the WTO, a big objective in the months and years ahead; and expanding NAFTA to help the struggling democracies in Latin America.

Now, while the United States and the industrial democracies use open markets to encourage countries to modernize and hopefully move more and more in the direction of greater domestic political transparency, openness, and liberalization, the major democracies should also keep their powder dry. They should maintain insurance policies in terms of our basic alliance structure in Asia and in Europe. I do not want to reduce our military footprint around the world, as John does. I want us to maintain a strong NATO, which will expand by the way next month in Prague. I want to maintain strong alliances in Asia and perhaps multilateralize those alliances. And, I'd like to see the United States support also the UN peacekeeping activities, especially on the continent of Africa as long as UN activities involve local leadership and a large contingent of local forces. Without such local leadership and participation by Africans, UN peacekeeping simply becomes a new imperialism, the white man's burden to come in to try to stabilize the wars going on in Africa, which have been pervasive in the last 10 years. Africans can and should take more responsibility for themselves, with the UN supporting but not dominating their efforts.

So what do I conclude from all of this? Well, America can try to do more than just preserve its dominance in order to protect its survival. It can use that dominance, as it did after World War II, among the western states to move national identities in a direction toward more not less political and economic liberalization. This does not preclude a vigorous defense of US and western democratic interests against threats from terrorists or rogue states. But it does imply gaining at least a majority support of other democracies, not just to deal with threats, but also to open markets around the world-the best leverage we have to encourage further convergence of identities in the direction of democratic standards.

HH: I want to thank both John and Henry for some very provocative comments. Let me start the discussion with a couple of questions which I hope will illuminate the differences, not only between John and Henry, but the differences between both of them and some other perspectives not represented here on the podium tonight.

Let me begin with the point that Henry made towards the very end of his remarks when he said that after World War II, the United States used its predominant influence to create international institutions. These include, not only the so-called Cold War alliances that John mentioned (NATO, the US-Japan bilateral alliances, SEATO the CENTO, and so forth), but also global institutions such as the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. What was not established until much later, but was envisioned at that time, was a World Trade Organization. And yet these institutions played a very minimal role in your analyses-a little in Henry's analysis as a source of legitimization for American foreign policy, but not as organizations that could provide meaningful resolutions of conflict, norm setting, or norm enforcement.

My question, then, is as follows: Is the international order so different from domestic politics that we cannot have the same vision of rule of law, pluralism, indeed democratization for the international system that the United States espouses for other nation-states? And, secondly, does not the creation of regional international institutions in post-war Europe indicate that that is a feasible objective? In other words, aren't the liberals correct in saying that the creation of such institutions should still be our long-term vision, rather than a worldview that is simply based on a balance of power in which the United States is dominant? We would never accept that vision in an authoritarian country --, that a government should stay in power and forever be dominant. We would always argue for pluralism, the rule of law, and accountable institutions. Why don't we argue that at the international level as well?

JM: I've written a piece on international institutions for anybody who is interested in my extended views on the matter. It is called "The False Promise of International Institutions." I have what you might call a stereotypical realist view of institutions. I do not believe that they are useless, and I agree with Harry's point that at the end of World War II the United States played a key role in creating a handful of institutions, which were very useful for waging the Cold War. NATO, for example, served us well from 1949 until 1990. So I'm not opposed to creating institutions and I don't deny their usefulness.

The key question, however, is: how do these rules or laws, which are the essence of institutions, relate to great powers like the United States? Basically, I have a balance of power view on this matter, which is to say that the United States created those institutions so that they would serve American interests, and we run those institutions! Most of you are too young to remember Boutros Boutros-Ghali-he was Kofi Annan's predecessor at the United Nations. That guy would not dance to our tune, so do you know what we did to him? We said, "You're out of here buddy," and we brought in Kofi Annan. And Kofi Annan understands very well that he has to be careful when dealing with the United States because if he makes us angry he will be out of a job too. We are able to write the rules and run institutions because we are the most powerful state in the system.

Now, what happens if the rules don't suit our interests? You know what we do-we say, "We are going to break the rules and do what we want!" What is George Bush, this great proponent of democracy, telling the United Nations? "Look friends, you have two choices. You either give us the resolution we want, or if you don't, we're going to go do what we want to do anyway." Is the UN a really important institution? I don't think so.

Let me close with my favorite story about institutions. Madeline Albright-a great liberal of the kind that Henry identifies with-was conversing with Britain's Robin Cook in preparation for the war against Yugoslavia (1999). We had a real problem there, because we could not get the UN to sanction the war. Secretary of State Albright, talking to Robin Cook on the phone, asked, "Are you ready to go?" He replied, "We got a problem. I'm talking to my lawyer, and my lawyer tells me we can't go to war because we don't have a UN resolution." And she says, "What?" And he says, "My lawyer tells me that we can't go to war because we don't have a UN resolution." And she says, "What?" And he repeats his answer. Then she says, "Robin, there's a very simple solution. Get a new lawyer." That's what international law is all about.

HH: Henry, how would you answer that -- again the idea that we seem to have a totally different set of values at the international level than we do at the domestic level? You're talking about promoting democracy at one level but not at the other.

HN: You know, institutions play a role in my scheme of things. For example, I made it very clear that I want us to preserve our alliances, even after the end of the Cold War where they were particularly useful. I think they remain useful. And there's evidence in studies that have been done to suggest that in fact American policy in those alliances is often restrained, is often constrained. Case studies of NATO show times, for instance, when in fact the United States has not done exactly what it wanted to do but compromised with allies, reflecting the influence these institutions can have upon American foreign policy. But, there's a limit. I suggested that the most important thing for the United States from my perspective is to work with other democracies who believe not just in institutions per se, but in institutions that are run by the rule of law, and that are representative, and that are open to the people, and whose representatives are elected by the people, and who respond to the will and the interests of the people.

Now, you can't think of many international organizations that have all of these features. They're all intergovernmental organizations that do not respond directly to the will of the people. But there is one set of relationships in which I think we need to be very careful and honor and respect informal institutional constraints, and that is in relations with the other major democracies. This is the case because of what we believe. We believe that we can only act inside democracies with majority support. It seems to me that strong democracies, and I'm thinking again primarily of the G-7, ought to hold to that same value in their relationships with one another. Whether they do it through permanent institutions like the European Union or through less formal arrangements such as the G-7 Annual Summit Meetings is less important to me than the fact that they work and ultimately act together, even if they do so in loose, sometimes informal ways. In the process, they must honor the basic rule that if we can't convince each other, at least a majority of us, to act in a certain way, then maybe we ought to think twice about what we're advocating-just the way democracies operate domestically.

But there are very few international institutions, including the G-7 summits that operate democratically. This is a bit of a problem in the way most of us think about international institutions. We think of international institutions like the UN as democratic because they include everybody. But participation is only one very small part of democratic institutions. A bigger part is the rule of law and of the people. The UN itself, as I suggested, is made up of members, more than half of the current members, who are not democratic. And although we need to work with these nations, it does not seem to me that the UN has any special or sole legitimacy in international affairs. You cannot think about those institutions in the same way that you would about domestic and international institutions, formal or informal, among the strong democracies.

HH: Okay, so you guys aren't liberals. That's clear. But let me ask you about another version of realist thinking on the current situation that again is not represented here tonight. There are those who believe that as powerful as the United States is today, it is absolutely self defeating and quixotic for us to think that we can be the dominant power for a protracted period of time. They argue that ultimately, the balance of power will work against us. Whether we call it a balance of power for freedom, or simply a balance of power that we dominate, they say that eventually we are going to encounter a mobilization of international forces to counterbalance us, no matter what we stand for. John, is that a danger? Obviously, you don't seem to think so.

JM: I would make two points. First, the United States is now the most powerful state on the face of the earth. And I think almost everybody agrees that, at least for the immediate future, that's going to remain the case. Over the long term, as I said before, except for the possibility of a rising China, the United States looks likely to remain number one.

Let me say a little more about this matter. The two principle indicators of latent military power are population size and economic strength. The United States has close to 300 million people now. Given the birthrates of indigenous Americans, and present immigration trends projected out into the future-and there's no reason to think that the immigration patterns are going to change very much-the United States is expected to have somewhere around 500 million people by the year 2050. If you look at IMF and UN demographic projections, China now has a five-to-one population advantage over the United States. It is expected to have a three-to-one population advantage over us in the year 2050. And as I said before, all of our past competitors, like the Japanese, the Russians, the Germans, the Italians, and the British, have shrinking populations. Japan now has a population of 126 million people. It's expected to have roughly 94 million people by the year 2050. If you look at Russia, at the end of the Cold War it had about 149 million people. It's losing about 750,000 people a year. Most demographic projections put it down around 100 million in the year 2050. Some demographic projections actually put it down around 80 million in the year 2050. So, there's only one country out there that can stand up to us on the population front, and that is China, which also might have the economic might to challenge us.

Turning now to economic wherewithal, as you know, we have an incredibly talented pool of human capital in this country. Furthermore, the United States acts like a giant Hoover vacuum cleaner going around the world sucking up the best brains and bringing them back here and turning them into American citizens. Of course, places like George Washington University and the University of Chicago are an important part of that effort to cream off the best and the brightest around the globe. All of this results in an American economy that is very dynamic. It's hard to imagine any other state keeping up with us over time. So, in terms of population size and economic might, we are in terrific shape. This is why I think one of the biggest issues over the course of this century will be how the United States uses its tremendous economic and military power in the world.

Second, regarding the issue of balancing, it is hard to get states to balance against the United States because it is an offshore balancer. Specifically, the United States is a great power that is located in the Western Hemisphere, and it is very reluctant to fight major wars in other areas of the world. It is only recently that we became interested in stationing troops all over the globe. But even among people who advocate that the United States should continue that practice, they clearly understand that there is not much appetite for foreign adventures among the American people, and that if we ever ran into another Vietnam-like situation, there would be tremendous pressure to pull back American forces. In other words, the United States does have much of an appetite for conquest. For example, the United States is not going to go conquer the Middle East, even though the neo-conservatives would like us to do just that. The American military, as you can tell, has little appetite for fighting wars. So, we are not going to build an empire. And as long as we don't try to build an empire, and we don't get involved in too many wars, and we don't try and conquer the globe, you're not going to get balancing against the United States. Again we are located in the Western Hemisphere, where we are separated from the rest of the world by two giant moats that make it difficult for us to project power into places like Europe and Asia and threaten other countries, which is necessary to make other states balance against us.

Again, my bottom line is that the United States is in a wonderful position today in terms of the world balance of power. The principle threat we face is from terrorism, and there it is essential that we focus on destroying al Qaeda.

HN: Predicting the rise and fall of great powers is very, very difficult. I wrote a book 12 years ago called The Myth of America's Decline (Oxford 1990). My prediction that America would recover and not decline proved to be more accurate than Paul Kennedy's best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Random House 1987), which predicted the opposite. So prediction is tricky, especially as Yogi Berra would say when it is about the future. It 's true historically that no country has ever retained forever or even for a century the extent of power that we currently have in the world. So if you're a student of history, you might well conclude that at some point we will begin to decline for internal reasons, and other countries will begin to coalesce or expand and grow more rapidly than we currently anticipate, and there will be some counterbalancing.

But more important, I think, is the question that John himself raised. Let's assume we are going to remain preeminent. What are we going to do with that preeminence? What are we going to do with that power? John, in some sense, wants us to pull back to an offshore-balancing position, reduce our military footprint, and let other countries worry more about their own security. At the same time, however, he wants us to become more involved diplomatically in trying to solve problems for other countries. Now it is often very difficult to solve problems without using military force or at least the threat of military force. You have to be willing to back up your diplomacy with military force or no one will take your diplomacy very seriously. I'm not sure how we solve this Middle East problem without having a diplomacy that in some sense has the threat of force behind it or that at least thinks in terms of how one backs up diplomacy with force.

My argument is that there are better things we can do with our power. First of all, we don't need to retreat, certainly not as long as other countries want us to remain as partners in their defense. I'm thinking of the alliances. But we also have this enormous leverage and opportunity to use our market and to use our liberal economic ideology, which has been incredibly successful over the course of the last century, to develop the kind of flexible and dynamic society we have. Our economy is probably the most dynamic and the most flexible in the world, where we can move people around, at some cost of disruption and unemployment to be sure, but we move people around and find new jobs and get them into new industries faster than any other country. Why not use this power to draw other countries into the modern world, and into the globalization process, into the growth process? And then, possibly, although there is no guarantee, economic liberalization and economic openness may go on to lead to political liberalization or to more, not necessarily full, democracy in many of these countries. Ultimately, these countries themselves can only decide that outcome if in fact it's going to be genuine democracy. But at least we'd have a much better chance of bringing about that kind of a world than if we were to retreat and try to be diplomatic magicians, waving a wand and ending centuries-old hostilities. Some would criticize the Clinton administration for that, and Madeleine Albright. Albright is not necessarily my favorite secretary of state. I'll take Jeane Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thatcher-she was prime minister not secretary of state- as women diplomats who understood the role that force must play in effective diplomacy. And potentially, a diplomacy backed by force can accomplish something that will not necessarily reduce American power but convert it into a world that will be better and safer for millions of people, not just Americans. That was certainly the nature of the world that America helped to build after WWII.

HH: Yes, one final question. I'm going to ask it simply of John because it's basically asking him to comment on something that's very clear in Henry's analysis. John, you said the only possible great power threat to America's dominance is China, perhaps not imminently but over the long run. Henry seems to say that if China becomes more democratic, more market oriented, in other words, if its identity and values come more to resemble ours, that danger would be minimized. Do you think that makes any difference? Do you agree with that? Is that the key or not?

JM: I wish I had a whole hour to answer this excellent question. There are two ways of thinking about how to deal with China. The liberal approach is called engagement, and the idea here is that if you can turn China into a democracy, get it hooked on capitalism, and get it embedded in international institutions, we will all live happily ever after. What's the logic that underpins this argument? The logic is that the United States has noble intentions and behaves in benign ways toward other states. We are the good guys in the system. We rarely ever misbehave or cause trouble in international politics. We never use the mailed fist unless provoked. We believe in the rule of law, and so forth and so on. Thus, if you get the Chinese to imitate us, in other words if they are democratic, wedded to capitalism, and embedded in international institutions, we will live peacefully together, because you will then have a system where the two dominant powers are both exemplary citizens. This is the liberal view of how the United States can get along with a powerful China.

In my opinion, and Harry has heard me make this argument before, this perspective is based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of American behavior. I believe the Chinese will imitate us if they get rich. But what they're going to imitate is our real or actual behavior over time in the Western Hemisphere. In particular, they are going to try to dominate Asia the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere. Most of you-because you learned little American history in school, and because that little bit you learned is distorted-have little idea how the United Sates behaved in the nineteenth century. You have little idea what Manifest Destiny and what the Monroe Doctrine were all about. The founding fathers of this country went to great lengths to create a powerful United States that could dominate it neighbors. As you know, we were originally 13 small colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard. But we then marched across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, killing large numbers of people who got in our way, going to war with Mexico to take some of its territory, all for the purpose of creating a powerful America. We even tried to take Canada in the War of 1812, and we had our eye on Canada throughout the nineteenth century! Moreover, we would have gone into the Caribbean if it hadn't been for the fact that slavery was a controversial issue that put the brakes on expansion to our south. We had a huge appetite for conquest in this hemisphere!

Regarding the European empires that were in our hemisphere at the start of the nineteenth century, James Monroe effectively told them in 1823: "We are not strong enough to throw you out of here now, but we are going to move you out of this region eventually. This is our hemisphere, and you have no place here!" By 1900, those empires were gone and the United States was clearly the hegemon in Western Hemisphere. We went to great lengths over the twentieth century, especially during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to keep other great powers out of our hemisphere. Simply put we do not like distant powers interfering in the Americas.

Now, the question you have to ask yourself is: how is China going to behave when it is really powerful? I think they will have their own version of the Monroe Doctrine, and I think they will also have their own version of Manifest Destiny. In essence, they are going to want to control Asia the way the United States controls the Western Hemisphere. Is this because the Chinese are inherently aggressive? No. And by the way, I don't think the United States is inherently aggressive either. The Chinese, like the Americans will behave aggressively because the best way to survive in the international system is to be really powerful. How many of you go to bed at night worrying about Mexico or Canada attacking the United States? None! And that is because those countries are simply not powerful enough to even countenance attacking the United States. This is a wonderful strategic situation for us to be in, but you should always remember that the founding fathers worked very hard to create this situation, and we have worked very hard over the course of the twentieth century to maintain it, and we will work very hard in the twenty-first century to keep it that way.

Now, the question is: why does anyone think that a powerful China would behave differently than we have behaved over the past two centuries? The Chinese are realists par excellence. They were very interested in translating my book into Chinese. In fact, the translator tells me that there is a long list of people who want to read the book, because they find my realist explanation of how America behaves in the foreign policy realm more convincing than the liberal version, which portrays the United States as a benign force largely uninterested in power politics. In short, I believe that if the United States helps make China rich-which is what the liberals want to do-we will get a China that imitates us. Only it's going to imitate the real America, not the fictitious America that most of you believe in.

HH: That sounds like a good argument to me for changing American policy, so that China will imitate something different, but that's another issue.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that the mark of a successful evening is that time runs out before interest flags, and I think that's what's happened here. Even though we did not reach any consensus tonight, I think we have illuminated not only immediate issues of policy, but also long-term issues of American grand strategy, rooted in very different views of how the world works. Thank you all for joining us.