General Brent Scowcroft
Chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
with Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Former Secretary of State
Moderated by Kenneth W. Thompson
Former Director, Miller Center
"American Foreign Policy:  Past and Present"
September 24, 2002

Gen. Brent Scowcroft: The end of the Cold War changed the war that had been with us, really, since World War I.  Relieved as we war from the pressures of the cold war and a nuclear possibility at any time, we sort of turned our back on foreign policy and treated it more like charity--when we wanted, we would give a little and when we did not, we would not.  There were not any problems out there so we did not have to take anything seriously.  I think in the process of this decade since the end of the Cold War, we did not see a lot of things happening in the world.  I think there were a couple that are important and have now caught up with us. 

There are two contradictory trends in the world.  The first was what we affectionately called globalization.  And that is that the nation state is becoming porous and that the borders of the states, which were once absolute and allowed governments to control what went on within those borders and to protect their citizens from the outside, are no longer able to do that.  Whether it is capital flows, communication, entertainment, environmental issues--none of them are stopped by borders anymore.  It is a whole new world.

For us, the Europeans, Japanese and a few others, this is a world of promise because it is an integrating world inwhich we can all profit by closer interchange.  But for most of the world, that is not true.

In 1945, there were 51 members of the United Nations.  There are not 190, most of them poor, weak and barely able to provide the minimum for their citizens.  So, what for us is a promising future, for the much of the world it is a bewildering melange of forces that they cannot understand, much less begin to control, assaulting their cultures and everything they hold dear.

There are blue jeans, Big Macs, licentious television--you name it.  The reaction is one, part of which we saw in Seattle and we will see in Washington, of demonstrations against globalization.  But, it is a fact and not a policy. A lot of the reaction that I think has turned to terror is a total rejection of this assault on a world that had been unchanged for centuries.

The other phenomenon is almost the polar opposite.  That is the tendency recently to break into ever smaller, more intolerant political units.  The classic example of that is Yugoslavia where it is an artificial state, but it makes no economic sense in a world now to break a small country into five other countries.  And yet, that is the tendency.  So, these two are working in this world we have and they are producing a world unlike any that we have seen.  It is not one that we are used to, where aggression necessarily takes place across international borders and you can sort it out.  It takes place inside borders.  It is confused--you do not know who the good guys or the bad guys are.  And, on top of it all, is the United States has not really thought what it means to be in the position we are in.  Not since the Roman Empire has one country so dominated the world.  We dominate it and yet we cannot control it and we act without forethought in many cases--not realizing what we are doing, why we are doing it, or the impact it has on the world.  So, we are in a very messy time.  We are now in the process of trying to sort it out with indifferent success.

Lawrence S. Eagleburger: I would like to follow up on this for a minute.  I want to start with this question of a world promise, which is true for us but only up to a point.  It is a world of promise for us if we are smart enough to sort our way through it.  It is a world of real mess for us if we are not, I think.  It gets to Brent's point about not knowing where we are now or where we want to go.  We have not sorted our way through it all.  We do know that we have a messy time and we have realized that it is a far more uncertain world than it ever was in the worst days of the Cold War.  The Cold War, as we have seen by now, had a certain degree of predictability to it that we don't have now.  That has made us all very nervous, in a way.  The real point here and the point that Brent has made is when do we--the United States--sort this through for ourselves and decide where it is in this new and messy world that we want to do, where we want to go and what our role should be.  It is not at all unusual, I think, that we should say to ourselves that we do not know yet. 

If you take a look at history, in similar circumstances, I do not think you will find any cases where, after a revolutionary period, people immediately knew where they wanted to go.  After the collapse of Napoleon, for example, it took the Congress of Vienna many years.  Then they found out that the Congress of Vienna produced no lasting results and we had years and years of crisis after that.  Is that what we are going to go through again?  I do not know.  But, I think that if we as a nation begin to debate these questions openly, then we can begin to find our way through it.  And here is my point:  it is going to be very easy for us to decide now that there is nobody on the other side of this thing to make us sit up and take notice of the fact that, simply because we want something, does not mean that there are not others out there that could prevent us from having it.  It is going to be very easy for us as the world's only super-power for us to decide that we are going to have our own way.  Again, I am not judging whether or not we should take on Sadam Hussein, but the very fact that we talk about it as we are now in terms of we need a regime change in Iraq.  If you ask yourself in a different sense, who is it that appointed the United States as the arbiter of what regime ought to be resident in Baghdad.  The answer to that is that no one has appointed us but, on the other hand, we are the world's only super-power.  Those are the kind of decisions we can probably make if, for no other reason, because we are as powerful as we are.  We can fluff it all up here with all sorts of rationale as to why we should be doing this, he's a dangerous man, etcetera.  They may all be perfectly rational arguments for getting rid of him, but the point is that, if you back it up a few years, no one in his right mind was going to sit there and say that there was a regime change needed in Iraq when Moscow was sitting there with nuclear weapons in hand. 

What am I trying to say?  The world has changed.  The United States is now, in its own way the arbiter of many things.  Not too many years ago we would never of thought of trying to decide.  The question for the American people, I think, to a great degree is how much of that muscle flexing do we really want to engage in and what are the consequences of it if we do it, not just tomorrow morning, but five years or ten years out?  How much should he United States really care about the good will of most of the rest of the world when, in fact, no single part of that rest of the world could possibly compete with us if we decide we want to make a decision and carry it out. 

What about the good will of the rest of the world toward us? Not again, in terms of the next six months or the next six years, but between now and the year 2050, what is it that the United States wants to try to conceive as the global position we will be in during that year 2050?  What is it that we think we ought to create in that period of time for the rest of the world?  We ought to do it, I think, by at least trying to consider what the costs of what we do may be.  For example, if we are going to invade Iraq and get rid of Sadam, are we prepared to pay the costs it may entail, in terms of keeping troops in Iraq for a period of time.  You know all of these questions.  I am not saying that we should not do it, but I am saying a healthy debate on these situations--what is it that the United States ought to be prepared to pay for whatever it is we think we want out of this world between now and the year 2050.  Remember that in a democracy such as ours, you can only commit generations to come up to a certain point.  If you do not believe that, take a look at what the generation prior to the Vietnam War thought that it could get away with or could commit succeeding generations to do and see how long that lasted once a new generation was required to fight in Vietnam.  You see what I am talking about.  You have to think about these things in terms of not only acceptability in terms of what the rest of the world is prepared to accept from you, but what you are prepared to accept from yourself.  I do not think we are thinking about those questions at all.  I worry about contemporary hubris, if you will, that we are a little too prideful at the moment.  I will really get myself in trouble now by saying this, but I see this not just in these far-right-wing people who want to impose democracy in Iraq tomorrow morning, if that was even conceivable.  But also human rights advocates who, because human rights pertain in this country in certain conditions, they think that the same ought to pertain everywhere else in the rest of the world and that Americans ought be prepared to fight and die for that sometimes in some places.  The same is true with regard to globalization and environmental issues.  We tend too often to try to impose what we consider to be the proper moral, if you will, alternative in areas where we really have not thought through whether others in this world accept those same standards and can be persuaded to accept those standards or whether they will be have to made to accept them.  For example, I have serious doubts that the United States, at the point of a bayonet, can make the Iraqi people accept democracy, even though they may not like Sadam Hussein much, if at all.  I am not at all sure that they are going to be prepared to accept an American definition of democracy imposed upon them at the point of a bayonet for very long.  Those are the kinds of questions I think we have to start thinking about far more than we are.  The Iraq debate, if I may, in microcosm begins to get you at some of these of these questions.  The trouble with it is that it gets bogged down too soon in the narrower questions of whether he has a nuclear weapon or not, and so on.  If you can get your mind past that to thinking about the consequences of our acts and the consequences of our acts if others do not agree with us, like our closest ally, and whether we should care about whether our allies agree with us or not.  Maybe we should not care.  After the recent demonstrations of German devotion to our alliance with them, I frankly would tell you that if the Germans want to take a hike tomorrow, I could care less at what they have demonstrated as their devotion to their relationship with the United States. 

It is an interesting fact, I am way off the topic now, that the FDP, the small German party that was contending in the elections that one of its deputy chairmen made some viciously anti-semitic remarks, and he was fired.  When was he fired?  The day after the election when it was clear that they had lost the election anyway.  Not the day after he made the statement, but the day after the election.  It is also interesting that the chancellor fired their justice minister who had compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler the day after the election, not the day after the person made the statement because it did make a difference in terms of the election.  The chancellor won that election because he became very anti-American in that campaign and the justice minister contributed to all of that by comparing Bush and Hitler.  The chancellor got very properly angry after that, the day after the election, not the day after the person made the statement.  All I am trying to say here is that as we go into looking at all these questions about the future, one of the things that is going to impact on all of us, such as myself, obviously is going to be the conduct of others.  If we are not careful we are going to get excited over this, as I just did.  If I were president right now, relax, I am never going to be, but if I were, tomorrow morning we would start pulling troops out of Germany.  That would be a mistake, I think.  The fact of the matter, is that others have to recognize that there are consequences to dealing with us.  Not only do we have to realize that there are consequences to dealing with the rest of the world, they have got to recognize it, too.  We are sometimes not sufficiently strong on that point.  If that is not a contradiction to everything I just said a few minutes ago, I do not know what is.  But my point here is, ladies and gentlemen, that the United States is, whether we like it or not, for the first time in our history and for really the first time in the history of the world since well before the collapse of the Roman Empire, we are the arbiter of events in this world, unlike any country for a very long period of time, if you will.  And we may not like that, but we are stuck with it.  One of the things that a sensible democracy ought to try to begin to debate about, and we are not, which is so frustrating to me, is what does it mean to all of us and what does it mean to the way in which we ought to try to conduct ourselves in this world.  With those words, which that and twenty five cents will get you a cup of coffee, I want to turn it back to my doting son over here. 

Kenneth W. Thompson: I just wonder we talk about the past in the title and I wonder about the past of a position that you in particular General Scowcroft but probably you Larry as well took throws any like on the likelihood of this sorting things out is a good ting to do. You were criticized by some after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism you were criticized for moving things slowly in thinking through what the new Russia would do in the world and people said well we don’t have time to do that we got to seize the moment on that. Now we know what happened with our relations with Russia. Does that offer any light on what the two of you have been talking about? Does that shed any light on what the two of you have been talking about?

Gen. Scowcroft: Russia is a very special case, Yet I think it is a country still searching for its soul both politically and economically. They’ve had two revolutions. A political revolution, throwing out and absolute dictatorship and a economic revolution, throwing out a command economy. And they did it in a manne r which left the government no control over what happened. And Russia is now trying to put the pieces together. I think they deserve a decent period to do that. We can’t do that for them although as Larry suggests, we might try. I think Russia is a good example of the kinds of problems in the world that we tend to think there is an easy answer for -- just become democratic. And Yeltsin once said it’s going to take us two years we are going to be a little chaotic while we change things around and then we are going to be a parliamentary democracy with a market economy. Well things don’t happen that way. We have tried regime change before. I can think of three examples for it. The first one was president Nguyen of South Vietnam. We didn’t like the way he was conducting the war there so we got rid of it. Remember what happened in Vietnam. The next one was the Shah of Iran. We said these demonstrators in the street are after a liberal regime. They want democracy, they want human rights, they want all these things. So we encouraged the Shah to leave. Look what happened in Iran. The third one was Somoza in Nicaragua. We booted him out. None of these are paragons of virtue, but look what happened we had a war  against the contras for twenty years in Nicaragua. I see no reason that it should be much different in Iraq. We understand probably less than any other country in the world how people behave    (different people), because we don’t have borders and people coming in and out so much. All we see is other Americans. We tend to make decisions on things as if everybody else were Americans just like us and we see the world in that way. We are a very tiny part of the world in terms of the values we have and the kinds of things we hold dear. We have to I think be very very careful in trying to remake the world in our image. We ought to make it better. We ought to be the shining city on a hill and we ought to say this is the way we organize our society and we think it is the best for everybody, but that is very different from imposing it on everybody,  which so far has not worked.

Thompson: So there is a lesson from history.

Gen. Scowcroft: Well there are always lessons from history. But they don’t always teach you something.

Eagleburger: I agree with everything you said. I just want to make a point here. If I can. I will use myself as an example. If you’ve spent too much time dealing with a set of issues or on a certain set of circumstances and things then begin to change rapidly you tend to try to hold those things back. – Yugoslavia for example, I think I can be legitimately be criticized. It’s not that I thought we could stop the collapse of Yugoslavia, but I think I can legitimately be criticized for thinking it could be slowed down. For thinking that the breaking apart could end up being done in a rational way. And the fact of the matter is when you get into that kind of a historic explosion, it ain’t gonna be rational. It’s impossible to impose rationality on that kind of a situation and I think I made a misjudgement there to some degree. What I am trying to say is you have to be careful when you look at your history and the lessons to be drawn from history not to over do that. For example I think you can make a strong argument that in many of these cases the best lesson from history is to step back and let it happen. And for a democracy, that is the most difficult choice to make because you have great many politicians and well-wishers and all sorts of people banging at you because you are not doing anything. And I think Brent would agree with me that this can create tremendous political pressure on you to take steps at a time when the best thing to do might be to do nothing and to let things develop for a while.