Two In-Boxes

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As he reviews his predecessor’s leadoff article in the May 1990 Proceedings, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reflects upon lessons learned over the past four years and explains why he needs a second in-box to sort through today’s national-security priorities.

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Four years ago, when General Colin L. Powell opened his first article in Proceedings with a brief snapshot of how he saw the world, he offered an insightful warning that great changes were afoot. Although I am sure he never intended that to be the start of a tradition, I cannot think of a better topic for a first article. The time has come for an update, as seen from another new Chairman’s in-box, but four years down the road. The greatest lesson I’ve learned already is that a Chairman today needs two in-boxes; one is no longer enough. Before departing for my post with NATO, I served as

the Assistant to the Chairman and was therefore ¹ stranger to what passes across this desk. Yet, only a f^£' weeks before I returned to Washington, 18 courageo¹ American soldiers died in a vicious firefight against w’³ lord Mohamed Farah Aideed’s gunmen in Mogadisl¹ More than any other recent event, this tragic loss sen¹ jolt across the nation. It was an infuriatingly treachero'¹ and unjust reward for the compassionate impulse that 1^£ our forces to Somalia in the first place.

Probably like the rest of you, I reacted with outrage n^,: anger. Then, again like many others, I saw it as a waf¹

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ing that showed how badly we need to take stock of the changes that have swept the world in the past four years and what this means for the United States. Although some may feel that most of these changes have already been over-analyzed, what we learn from the instant analysis of CNN studios often takes on a different aura with the passage of time.

In 1989, we quickly learned a valuable first lesson. With our first inkling that the Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of disintegration, we knew this was apt to set loose a mix of anguishing and exhilarating new forces in the world. Not that we needed any proof, but Saddam Hussein quickly showed us what this meant.

It is utterly unlikely that he would have ordered his forces to attack Kuwait as long as the U.S.-Soviet competition remained a lively factor in Southwest Asia’s balance of power. When President Jimmy Carter announced his Carter Doctrine in 1978, he served notice of the grave importance we attach to this region and its oil supplies. Then, to underline our stakes, the doctrine told one and all of our resolve to defeat aggression in the region. The world understood this to carry over to the Soviet Union, to its regional allies, and to local aggressors such as Iran and Iraq.

While the Soviet Union remained our adversary, the doctrine had the strong deterrent effect in the region that we intended. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union apparently led Saddam to believe that our view of the stakes in the region had changed. Because we would no longer fear a Soviet hand, he thought we would take a more permissive view toward local aggression. So he attacked. His principal mistake was in believing that our interests are defined by threats, such as an expanding Soviet Union, when in fact they are an unconditional expression of what we need to fulfill the core needs of our nation.

The implications of Saddam’s decision taught us a second urgent lesson: that nations around the world no longer base their calculations upon Cold War logic. A new logic prompts their decisions. No global struggle intervenes on their turf, restrains their behavior, or forces them to incur the same risk of involving outside powers. For some, this is liberating. They feel free to take steps and act in ways that were implausible or even dangerous more than four years ago. But the problem for most is that it contributes even more uncertainty to an already uncertain world.

The global response to Saddam’s attack reflected other changes stalking the world. But none was more remarkable than the support of United Nations Security Council members for using military force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Russia voted to support military operations, and China abstained from blocking this decision in the Security Council, despite the fact that the Soviet Union and Iraq had courted one another throughout the long years of the Cold War and that China was a major arms supplier to Iraq. No less surprising was the support of some Arab states that enlisted in the Coalition against Iraq. Even recognizing that some of them were motivated by narrow, nationalistic concerns, joining a United States-led Coalition to defeat another Moslem nation was, for nearly all, a significant and a traumatic shift.

On the other side of the world, the Cambodian war that

Proceedings / May 1994

raged intractably since the last years of the Vietnam War, that had rattled the world’s conscience with its barbarism, its medieval tactics, and its horrible toll of dead and maimed, suddenly opened up to a United Nations-gamered peace settlement. In El Salvador, a similar solution ended that country’s long and disheartening civil war.

These turns of events made us conscious of another, more hopeful lesson: that in this new era opportunities are ripe to bridge some old differences and to end some old conflicts, most notably those whose fires were stoked by the Cold War. This realization led to an explosion of U.N. peacekeeping operations. In three years, the United Nations authorized more operations of this type than in the entire period since its founding. Suddenly, newspaper columnists were trying to make us overnight experts on the U.N. Charter, and a new cottage industry of peace experts sprouted wings in Washington.

Even while we were thrilled to see these events unfold, more disquieting trends started to flash across our television screens. The Republic of Yugoslavia, having experienced corrosive strains since the death of Marshal Josip Tito, began to dissolve. Tragically, when a democratic attempt to divide peacefully into separate states failed, the Croats and the Serbs went to war. It was the first conflict of its kind in Europe since 1945, and it signaled a tempestuous new phase for the continent.

This withering slide into war occurred while I was in northern Iraq commanding Operation Provide Comfort, the U.N. effort to protect and nourish the safe haven carved out of northern Iraq for its Kurds. Although I was embroiled in a struggle between belligerent factions within the same nation, I did not anticipate that problems of this nature would tear at the very heart of Europe. Throughout the Cold War, the Kurdish problems in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey bubbled to the surface from time to time. It was an old problem with long roots, stirred intermittently by fresh waves of terrorist attacks or new government offensives. But, having witnessed nothing like this in Central Europe since World War II, we were deluded into believing that such bitter hatreds were things of the past. This is why I—and I think many others—are so surprised when this disease broke out in Europe.

While the rest of Yugoslavia became engulfed in the horrors of ethnic cleansing, similar battles broke out around the periphery of what used to be the Soviet Union. In Ng- horno-Karabach, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and a number of other places only faintly if at all familiar to Americans, citizens of newly founded nations began fighting against one another.

From this, we were reminded of yet a fourth lesson: when empires crash, they leave behind them confusion, disorder, and fertile seeds of conflict and struggle. Any empire, no matter its virtues, casts an umbrella over its members that provides economic and political structure, a sense of security, and eventually, a feeling of normality. When this umbrella folds, these go with it, and it may take a long time to settle. The conflicts boiling over in the Balkans have many of their roots in the failures of the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires that were so powerful much earlier in this century. In the case of the Soviet Empire, parts of which existed for hundreds of years, most of the new nations formed on its soil are ter-

43

ribly insecure, unsure of their identity or coherence, and wedded to the remnants of the only past they know. It could be a long time before anything resembling genuine normality, order, or balance is restored.

Ironically, as all of this was happening, we in the West were busy questioning the foundations of the institutions we erected during the era of bipolar confrontation, the very institutions that have given us stability, secu-

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economies of the industrialized nations remain entire dependent on the unhampered flow of oil to move oi °P^e

cars, to warm our homes, and to fuel our factories. In

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technology, and labor that flow so fluidly and in such pert" erful currents throughout East Asia. And a strong, pro-

perous, free, and democratic Europe is as important to ^r

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today as it was in the chilliest nights of the Cold War.

By understanding our interests, we a^f

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quire a sense of our national security orities, as the past four years ha'.^ p shown—for that matter the previd 10,000 years—the world is a perpetual _c° ^ troublesome place. We need to kno , which troubles concern us and which <1. .

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form into a dangerous situation— cause we are risking them and the n^:. tional prestige that they P^rou^_oceai represent—even the most remote inte¹ est is going to swell in importance.

Our principal security concerns^^^' those that will have the greatest beariH^^ on our future—are the problems tfr may arise in the states of the former " viet Union. The continued existence ^l p_{Qr (} more than 30,000 nuclear warheads >'

these states ensures this. It is also d

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derscored by our memories of the P^a<_contj 50 years, when all of Europe lay tenS‘^_eca

overarmed, divided, and occasionallyh

rity, and international cooperation. I saw this from my seat in NATO. Even as East European nations formed queues to join, we openly speculated whether NATO, the most successful coalition in world history, should continue. Looking at our alliances in East Asia, we conveyed a similar sense of ambivalence, wondering whether we should maintain our forces in this region or whether we should force our increasingly wealthy regional allies to bear all the costs for their own defense.

What we learned from this, as National Security Advisor Tony Lake observed in a recent speech, is that these institutions and the free-market democracies that compromise their members are our greatest reservoir for future stability and security. Instead of dismantling or weakening them, we need to look for ways to strengthen and modify them, to expand their purpose and perhaps their membership, and to adjust them to block newly emerging threats. We must turn them into our springboards to create a safer world than we have known for the past century. While we may be the world’s only remaining superpower, unless we want to carry its burdens alone, we need to sustain and build upon our coalitions.

Having learned these lessons, what should we watch for in the future? First, we have to make sure we can understand our own national interests and that others do as well. Our national interests have not changed one iota, even though the threats against them have changed. The

the brink of war. The walls have con* down, and we must now sew the cd¹ tinent back together with common p¹ litical and economic systems and a common trust amort f_usg~ its nations. We cannot afford to be naive or shortsighd _man, about the magnitude of this undertaking. The former _estaj; viet states will not realize prosperity and democrat _ngw overnight. It will be a long and difficult struggle art -pj will depend on Western help. It is a challenge that go^ _vp_a| beyond security; it is political and economic and militaf) ₀f _sr The end of the bipolar era makes our global challen? more complex in other ways as well. Four years ago _ancj, had a single, integrated global strategy to counter a glof j_{s m} ally tentacled threat. That threat has passed, but left b* hind are a number of real and potential local threats. Tl^,r purpose of our global strategy now is to provide guidand and direction for the creation of separately tailored P gional strategies.

The threats to our interests are now disassociated, P dependent, and far-flung. In the Middle East and South west Asia are Iraq and Iran, both Moslem, one spurred b! religious angst and the other by a megalomaniacal lead?¹ with extraordinary ambitions. In Northeast Asia, Nod Korea confronts us with a nuclear challenge that cod¹ upset the balance of proliferation throughout the regioi¹ In our own hemisphere Cuba is one more dictatorship edr ing agonizingly toward failure, but one that could becorrt more dangerous than ever in its dying days. And, °^!

course, in Europe are the problems of instability in th‘ _________

former Soviet states, conflict in the Balkans, and a la^

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44

Proceedings / May

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