Policing utopia: the military imperatives of globalization.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.

Coming in rapid succession, three recent events - last August's cruise missile attacks against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, the resumption in December 1998 of hostilities with Iraq, and the launching, after fits and starts, of this spring's air campaign against Yugoslavia - have cast in sharp relief the centrality of military power to present-day American policy. Offering the apparent prospect of clean, quick and affordable solutions to vexing problems, force has become the preferred instrument of American statecraft. The deployment of U.S. forces into harm's way, once thought to be fraught with hazard and certain to generate controversy, has become commonplace. The result has been the renewed, intensified - and perhaps irreversible - militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

For American military men and women, the ten years that have transpired since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been intensely busy. Notably, however, that decade has contained only a single incident that strictly qualifies as war. As that one brief conflict fades into memory, moreover, its own significance dwindles. Indeed, when the military history of the 1990s is written, the Persian Gulf War will appear as an oddity, not a harbinger of things to come but a grand martial convocation unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Today the prospect of major war appears increasingly remote. The very idea of armies clashing in battle has acquired a vaguely disreputable odor. These conditions have prompted the United States to seek new ways of exploiting its military preponderance.

The result has been a spectacular outburst of military activism - not campaigns and battles, but myriad experiments in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace enforcement; the repeated use or threatened use of air power to warn, coerce or punish; and the employment of armed forces to bolster economic sanctions or to respond to anarchy, natural disaster and social disintegration. The prevailing fashion in operational code names tells the story: in contrast to the Torch, Husky and Overlord of yesteryear, today's warriors Deny Flight, Provide Comfort, Restore Hope, Uphold Democracy or, in Albania, offer sanctuary in an Allied Harbor.

Seldom does the assigned mission in such endeavors entail the pursuit of victory. Like battle, "victory" has become an anachronism. The object of the exercise is rarely to defeat an enemy. Rather, it is to convey disapproval, change attitudes and dictate behavior. Never especially comfortable with Clausewitz, Americans have gone him one better. Rejecting the dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means, they have advanced the proposition that force is indistinguishable from politics. "Diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin", President Bill Clinton declared in a speech at the National Defense University in January 1998.

This development is rich with irony. After all, the President who has made the flexing of American military muscle into a routine event was once thought to be uncomfortable with the use of force. In its early days, the Clinton administration acquired, and at times seemed to flaunt, a reputation for disdaining things military. Mr. Clinton's critics, including many professional officers, openly questioned his qualifications to command the armed forces. Yet if success in aligning military practice with his own conception of strategy is a measure of effectiveness, President Clinton has been the very model of a successful commander-in-chief. His achievement has been as extraordinary as it has been unanticipated. Yet the legacy of that achievement is likely to be pernicious.

The Clinton Doctrine

At the time of Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, when it came to committing U.S. troops abroad only the most naive - or the most daring - commander-in-chief would presume to disregard the dictates of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine. Drafted in November 1984 at the behest of the then-serving secretary of defense, the Weinberger doctrine established guidelines for considering how and under what circumstances the United States would resort to the use of force. The doctrine's thrust was negative; its aim, to avoid the disaster of another Vietnam. Its six tests codified the lessons of that war: send Americans to fight only when vital national interests are at stake; establish unambiguous military and political objectives; intervene "with the clear intention of winning"; undertake only those missions that have popular and congressional support; when conditions change, reassess the commitment; and finally, employ force only as a last resort. When Caspar Weinberger enunciated his doctrine, critics complained that it was too confining and inflexible. But once seemingly validated by the Persian Gulf War and endorsed by General Colin Powell at the height of his influence, it became dogma.

Less than a decade later, the Weinberger-Powell doctrine has vanished. Phrases common to military discourse as recently as the early 1990s - "overwhelming force", "exit strategy", "mission creep", and "criteria of success" - have virtually disappeared from our vocabulary. Gone too is the spirit of caution and restraint implicit in Weinberger's six tests.

To be sure, the stirrings of change predated the Clinton years. The process of breaking free of constraints inherited from Vietnam became evident during the second half of the Bush administration. It was George Bush who in the aftermath of Desert Storm committed U.S. forces to rescue the Kurds in northern Iraq. Bush also deployed American troops to Somalia in response to famine and chaos in that benighted country. In a now all but forgotten incident, Bush, on the verge of leaving office, cuffed Iraq with pinprick air attacks, that method henceforth to become something of an American military signature.

Having said that, the present administration can rightfully claim credit for translating such inklings into its own full-fledged doctrine for the use of force, superceding Secretary Weinberger's six tests. The key aspects of the Clinton doctrine - the pre-eminence assigned to casualty avoidance; the emphasis on holding collateral damage to an absolute minimum; the expectation that the very prospect of American military action will compel or persuade; the unseemly haste to declare even the most modest use (or threat) of force a roaring success - have been described elsewhere.(1) Yet to ascribe this wholesale abandonment of military orthodoxy to presidential amateurism, disdain for the counsel of defense experts, or even efforts to distract attention from scandal is to misunderstand and underestimate its true significance.

Any great power - especially a great one suddenly deprived of its traditional adversary - faces the perennial dilemma of showing a reasonable return on its costly military investments. The currency of that return is political utility. The Clinton doctrine reflects this administration's considered response to that...