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THE NEXT WORLD ORDER
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
The Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine of power.
Issue of 2002-04-01
Posted 2002-03-25

When there is a change of command-and not just in government-the new people
often persuade themselves that the old people were much worse than anyone
suspected. This feeling seems especially intense in the Bush
Administration, perhaps because Bill Clinton has been bracketed by a
father-son team. It's easy for people in the Administration to believe
that, after an unfortunate eight-year interlude, the Bush family has
resumed its governance-and about time, too.

The Bush Administration's sense that the Clinton years were a waste, or
worse, is strongest in the realms of foreign policy and military affairs.
Republicans tend to regard Democrats as untrustworthy in defense and
foreign policy, anyway, in ways that coincide with what people think of as
Clinton's weak points: an eagerness to please, a lack of discipline.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, wrote an article in
Foreign Affairs two years ago in which she contemptuously accused Clinton
of "an extraordinary neglect of the fiduciary responsibilities of the
commander in chief." Most of the top figures in foreign affairs in this
Administration also served under the President's father. They took office
last year, after what they regard as eight years of small-time flyswatting
by Clinton, thinking that they were picking up where they'd left off.

Not long ago, I had lunch with-sorry!-a senior Administration
foreign-policy official, at a restaurant in Washington called the Oval
Room. Early in the lunch, he handed me a twenty-seven- page report, whose
cover bore the seal of the Department of Defense, an outline map of the
world, and these words:

Defense Strategy for the 1990s:
The Regional Defense Strategy
Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney
January 1993

One of the difficulties of working at the highest level of government is
communicating its drama. Actors, professional athletes, and even elected
politicians train for years, go through a great winnowing, and then perform
publicly. People who have titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
are just as ambitious and competitive, have worked just as long and hard,
and are often playing for even higher stakes-but what they do all day is go
to meetings and write memos and prepare briefings. How, possibly, to
explain that some of the documents, including the report that the senior
official handed me, which was physically indistinguishable from a
high-school term paper, represent the government version of playing
Carnegie Hall?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of
Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American foreign
policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The project, whose
existence was kept quiet, included people who are now back in the game, at
a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of
Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior
foreign-policy adviser to Cheney-generally speaking, a cohesive group of
conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and
intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. (Donald
Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares these characteristics, and has
been closely associated with Cheney for more than thirty years.) Colin
Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a
competing, and presumably more ideologically moderate, effort to reimagine
American foreign policy and defense. A date was set-May 21, 1990-on which
each team would brief Cheney for an hour; Cheney would then brief President
Bush, after which Bush would make a foreign-policy address unveiling the
new grand strategy.

Everybody worked for months on the "five-twenty-one brief," with a sense
that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake. When Wolfowitz and
Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May 21st, Wolfowitz went first, but
his briefing lasted far beyond the allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who,
perhaps, liked what he was hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't
get to present his alternate version of the future of the United States in
the world until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush,
using material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his major
foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2, 1990, the day that
Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed.

The team kept working. In 1992, the Times got its hands on a version of the
material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon
envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent
any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. A few weeks of
controversy ensued about the Bush Administration's hawks being
"unilateral"-controversy that Cheney's people put an end to with denials
and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version of the same material.

As it became apparent that Bush was going to lose to Clinton, the Cheney
team's efforts took on the quality of a parting shot. The report that the
senior official handed me at lunch had been issued only a few days before
Clinton took office. It is a somewhat bland, opaque document-a "scrubbed,"
meaning unclassified, version of something more candid-but it contained the
essential ideas of "shaping," rather than reacting to, the rest of the
world, and of preventing the rise of other superpowers. Its tone is one of
skepticism about diplomatic partnerships. A more forthright version of the
same ideas can be found in a short book titled "From Containment to Global
Leadership?," which Zalmay Khalilzad, who joined Cheney's team in 1991 and
is now special envoy to Afghanistan, published a couple of years into the
Clinton Administration, when he was out of government. It recommends that
the United States "preclude the rise of another global rival for the
indefinite future." Khalilzad writes, "It is a vital U.S. interest to
preclude such a development-i.e., to be willing to use force if necessary
for the purpose."

When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, he and the people around
him didn't seem to be proposing a great doctrinal shift, along the lines of
the policy of containment of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence which
the United States maintained during the Cold War. In his first major
foreign-policy speech, delivered in November of 1999, Bush declared that "a
President must be a clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to
connote an absence of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the
foreign-policy doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected, partly
because it posits the impossibility of any one country's ever dominating
world affairs for any length of time.

One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much the terrorist
attacks of September 11th have changed official foreign-policy thinking.
Any chief executive, of either party, would probably have done what Bush
has done so far-made war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda and enhanced domestic