A Grand Strategy?

The Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has become an apologist for the emerging American imperial doctrine as articulated in the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy (NSS). In an article in the recent edition of Foreign Policy, Gaddis concludes,

Despite...problems, the Bush strategy is right on target with respect to the new circumstances confronting the United States and its allies in the wake of September 11. It was sufficient, throughout the Cold War, to contain without seeking to reform authoritarian regimes: we left it to the Soviet Union to reform itself. The most important conclusion of the Bush NSS is that this Cold War assumption no longer holds. The intersection of radicalism with technology the world witnessed on that terrible morning means that the persistence of authoritarianism anywhere can breed resentments that can provoke terrorism that can do us grievous harm. There is a compellingly realistic reason now to complete the idealistic task Woodrow Wilson began more than eight decades ago: the world must be made safe for democracy, because otherwise democracy will not be safe in the world.

The Bush NSS report could be, therefore, the most important reformulation of U.S. grand strategy in over half a century. The risks are great--though probably no more than those confronting the architects of containment as the Cold War began. The pitfalls are plentiful--there are cracks to attend to before this vehicle departs for its intended destination. There's certainly no guarantee of success--but as Clausewitz would have pointed out, there never is in anything that's worth doing.

We'll probably never know for sure what bin Laden and his gang hoped to achieve with the horrors they perpetrated on September 11, 2001. One thing seems clear, though: it can hardly have been to produce this document, and the new grand strategy of transformation that is contained within it.

The last paragraph here is quite interesting, considering that other voices have suggested an increased American military presence around the globe is something that Al-Qaeda desires, at least temporarily, in order to rally sentiment against the United States.