Neocons' Nightmare: Not Being Able to Attack Who We Want

Posted by Jonathan Schwarz, A Tiny Revolution at 1:17 PM on April 6, 2008.

Five retired NATO generals (from the US, UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands) recently released a report with the Center for Strategic and International Studies called "Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing the Transatlantic Partnership." It details new and terrifying threats the world has never faced before (p. 27, pdf):

In addition to the ongoing threats posed by international terrorism by non-state or proxy-state actors, acts of war can be committed by individual nation states or allied states by abusing the leverage that other resources bring. China and Russia today are economic powers that might be tempted to deter other nations with the weapons of finance and energy resources. This kind of deterrence by non-military means represents a new phenomenon and has never been a part of traditional military thinking. To appreciate such cases strategically will demand a much broader conception of strategy than we have hitherto employed...

On the one hand, I thank God the United States and Europe have never stooped to using the "weapons of finance and energy resources." But how will innocents like ourselves know what to do when confronted with such nefarious enemies?

ALSO: Note the slippery change from one sentence describing other countries committing "acts of war," to the next sentence, where these countries merely are "tempted to deter other nations." This belief, that it is unacceptable and essentially an act of war for other countries to have the power to deter us from doing whatever we want, runs deep in US strategic thinking.

A good example is in this little-known January, 2001 memo from Donald Rumsfeld.

As you see, Rumsfeld is concerned about "regional powers" possessing WMD. But the problem isn't that they'll use them to attack us in a first strike, but rather that WMD will allow them to deter us and therefore deny us "access" to rest of the planet:

The collapse of the Soviet Empire has produced centrifugal forces in the world that have created new regional powers. Several of these are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis...

The post-Cold War liberalization of trade in advanced technology goods and services has made it possible for the poorest nations on earth to rapidly acquire the most destructive military technology ever devised including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons...

These universally available technologies can be used to create "asymmetric" responses that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia..."asymmetric" approaches can limit our ability to apply military power.

Another example is found in a September, 2002 speech by Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and author of the 2002 National Security Strategy, about the threat posed by Iraq. Once again, this threat is not that Iraq will attack us, but that their WMD will make it possible for someone to deter us (and Israel):

I criticize the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States...

Now, if the danger [from Iraq] is a biological weapon handed to Hamas, then what's the American alternative then? Especially if those weapons have developed to the point where they now can deter us from attacking them, because they really can retaliate against us, by then.

So watch out, world: you having the power to deter us from attacking you is the same thing as you attacking us. Not only that, but if you may be able to "attack" us like that in the future, we'll attack you for real, right now.

Tagged as: neocons

Jonathan Schwarz runs the blog, A Tiny Revolution.