[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 112 (Friday, July 26, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1385-E1386]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E1385]]


      AMERICAN INTERESTS, USE OF FORCE IN THE POST-COLD WAR WORLD

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. TILLIE K. FOWLER

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, July 26, 1996

  Mrs. FOWLER. Mr. Speaker, in the post-cold war world, one of the most 
pressing issues that faces this Nation is determining where our 
Nation's true security interests lie. There has been a dearth of real 
debate on this topic, and U.S. defense policy and foreign policy 
sometimes seem to be on auto-pilot, in spite of the fact that the 
current administration is deploying our defense forces around the globe 
with some regularity to address various concerns.
  I strongly believe that we can no longer afford this kind of a policy 
vacuum, and that we must undertake a comprehensive review of our 
national security status in order to fill it. I recently read an 
article by my National Security Committee chairman, Mr. Spense, in the 
Brown Journal of World Affairs, which echoed my concerns and contained 
some excellent commonsense suggestions. I would like to ask for 
unanimous consent to include it in the Record following my remarks.

What to Fight for? American Interests and the Use of Force in the Post-
                             Cold War World

                          (By Floyd D. Spence)

       Last fall, the House National Security Committee held a 
     series of hearings exploring the issue of American troops 
     being deployed to Bosnia. Yet, even while the committee 
     immersed itself in the particulars of the Balkan crisis, 
     there was a more profound, overarching issue that remained 
     unaddressed: in the post-Cold War World, what U.S. interests 
     justify the use of American military force?
       In this context, the debate over Bosnia was joined too late 
     and ended too quickly. Indeed, Americans have studiously 
     avoided confronting the issue of the relationship between 
     national interests and the use of military force, and for 
     good reason. It is a complex and difficult issue, and one 
     that five decades of Cold War containment policy obscured. 
     This nation simply has not comprehensively addressed the most 
     basic question about what interests are worth fighting and 
     dying for since the early 1950s.
       Much of this inertia is a natural result of almost fifty 
     years of preoccupation with the Cold War. The timing of the 
     Soviet empire's collapse was so sudden that is has left 
     American policymakers somewhat stunned. While we were 
     successfully waging the Cold War, policymakers never planned 
     for victory, especially one so complete.
       Still, it has been more than six years since the Berlin 
     Wall came down. One has only to reflect on the number and 
     variety of major operations conducted by the U.S. military 
     since 1989--Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, the 
     enforcement of the no-fly zones over northern and southern 
     Iraq and Bosnia, and now the commitment of 25,000 U.S. 
     ground troops to Bosnia--to recognize that more serious 
     thinking about our security interests is overdue.
       In and of itself, the dramatic reduction that the U.S. 
     military has undergone in the last decade ought to be 
     sufficient reason to compel us to do a better job of 
     establishing priorities. ``Doing more with less'' is an 
     accurate description of the U.S. military over the past 
     several years, but it is a slogan, not a plan, and a recipe 
     for eventual failure. One certain constant of a post-Cold War 
     world is that American might and global presence will remain 
     central to the promotion and protection of our interests and 
     will, similarly, play an instrumental role in shaping and 
     sustaining an international order that is consistent with 
     these interests.
       In the immediate chaotic aftermath of the Cold War's end, 
     the implosion of the Soviet empire, the reunification of 
     Germany, and the conduct of the Gulf War were the central 
     security preoccupations of the Bush administration. While the 
     Bush administration's ``New World Order'' represented a 
     rhetorical embrace of the impending international 
     uncertainty, in practice, the administration's employment of 
     American military power nonetheless reflected a cautious, 
     measured approach toward the use of force.
       ``Cautious'' and ``measured'' do not characterize the 
     Clinton administration's evolving approach to the use of 
     American military force. The current national security 
     strategy of engagement and enlargement seems more a 
     prescription for solving the world's problems, without 
     discriminating between those problems that affect the United 
     States and those that do not. President Clinton sees 
     virtually limitless opportunities to use the smaller U.S. 
     military in an untraditional and quixotic manner ``to 
     construct global institutions.'' Where previous 
     administrations have used force to advance American national 
     security interests, the current administration seeks to 
     secure ``the ideals and habits of democracy'' with little 
     regard for where, how, or at what cost. The deployment of 
     more than 23,000 soldiers and Marines to Haiti, costing more 
     than $1 billion in unbudgeted funds, is a perfect example.
       The result, as Michael Mandelbaum concluded in a recent 
     article in Foreign Affairs, has been ``foreign policy as 
     social work.'' Mandelbaum, who served as one of President 
     Clinton's early policy advisors, observed that where 
     previous administrations had been concerned with the ``the 
     powerful and potentially dangerous members of the 
     international community, which constitute its core,'' the 
     Clinton administration has paid more attention to ``the 
     international periphery.''
       In fact, by repeatedly deploying U.S. armed forces to ``the 
     international periphery,'' the Clinton administration has 
     strayed further even than Madelbaum suggests. It is one thing 
     to divert national attention to matters of peripheral 
     strategic importance; it is quite another to employ American 
     military might repeatedly and put national prestige at risk 
     where true security interests are not involved. In a world 
     where the United States remains the only superpower, 
     conducting national security policy as social work is a grave 
     mistake. Security policy must always remain focused on the 
     powerful ``core'' of the international community.
       The administration's national security policy seems 
     premised upon the idea that the end of the Cold War has 
     ``radically transformed the security environment.'' While it 
     is true that Red Army divisions no longer face NATO across a 
     West German border that no longer exists, what is perhaps 
     most noteworthy about the post-Cold War world is the 
     remarkable continuity of American security interests.
       Treating the Cold War conflict as a radical aberration in 
     the history of international politics quickly leads to 
     dangerous assumptions about the desired ends and means of 
     U.S. national security policy in the post-Cold War world. Why 
     did we consider the Soviet Union a threat? For three 
     fundamental reasons: their massive nuclear arsenal could 
     destroy the American homeland in a matter of minutes; their 
     large conventional forces endangered the broader balances of 
     power in Europe, East Asia, and the energy-producing regions 
     of the Middle East; and their sponsorship of destabilizing 
     political movements in the Third World threatened to 
     undermine the foundations of the international state system.
       Today, American security interests and strategic objections 
     have changed very little, except that rather than facing the 
     same adversary in every theater, we now confront multiple 
     antagonists driven less often by ideology than by deeply felt 
     national, ethnic, and religious hatreds. And our tasks remain 
     constant. As essayist Charles Krauthammer recently testified 
     to the National Security Committee, ``The role of the United 
     States is to be the ultimate balancer of power in the world, 
     and to intervene when a regional balance has been 
     catastrophically overthrown and global stability 
     threatened.''
       Protection and promotion of U.S. security interests in the 
     post-Cold War world will require as much effort, and arguably 
     more, as before the Berlin Wall crumbled. There is no single, 
     overwhelming threat, as was the case with the former Soviet 
     Union, that will serve as the central planning factor in 
     addressing questions of national interest, the use of force, 
     and the linkage between the two. But even if the monolithic 
     global threat of Soviet military aggression and communist 
     ideology has dissipated, global questions endure. If American 
     policymakers hope to find answers relevant to today's 
     environment, they need to begin by taking at least three 
     steps.
       First, policymakers must realize that the United States 
     cannot afford to take its strategic alliances for granted. 
     Indeed, the lack of a clear and present Soviet threat has 
     already revealed the fragility of the alliances that this 
     nation relies upon, in large part to protect its regional 
     interests and promote regional stability. One of the more 
     serious lessons of the Bosnia conflict is that NATO will not 
     go where America does not lead it, and that an alliance 
     constructed to contain the Soviet Union cannot be reworked 
     overnight to do things it was never designed to do. But 
     alliance leadership, while necessary, is not sufficient; wise 
     leadership is essential. In Bosnia, the Clinton 
     administration is leading NATO in pursuit of what a majority 
     of Americans see as a peripheral national interest.
       Second, we must be measured in the application of military 
     force. This does not mean employing the minimal force 
     necessary to accomplish a mission. Such false economies lose 
     wars and kill soldiers. Rather, it means

[[Page E1386]]

     maintaining a parsimonious attitude--grounded in a realist's 
     appreciation of national interests--about how and where the 
     U.S. military should be employed. America's shrinking armed 
     forces must remain the preeminent tool of U.S. international 
     diplomacy in times of peace and the ultimate arbiter in times 
     of war. Thus, their capabilities and resources should not be 
     expended on the international periphery.
       And finally, here at home, we must preserve properly sized 
     and shaped military forces in anticipation of continued 
     challenges to our security interests. A shrinking military 
     establishment, devoted to a growing number of peacekeeping 
     and humanitarian operations, will not be able to respond to 
     more ominous challenges to U.S. interests or threats to 
     regional and international stability. If history is any 
     guide, it is only a matter of time before such broad 
     challenges emerge. As Donald Kagan concludes in his epic 
     survey, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, 
     ``The current condition of the world * * * where war among 
     the major powers is hard to conceive because one of them has 
     overwhelming military superiority and no wish to expand, will 
     not last.'' We stand a far better chance of helping to 
     stabilize the post-Cold War world if we prove ourselves 
     wise stewards of our superpowers status, continue to 
     devote the resources necessary to prepare our soldiers, 
     sailors, airmen, and Marines who preserve it, and 
     judiciously employ armed force where the strategic stakes 
     justify the risks.
       The optimistic supposition of Western democracies that 
     peace is the normal human condition is prevalent in the 
     Clinton administration's approach to national security 
     issues. But change (often accompanied by turmoil and 
     conflict), not peace, is the natural human condition. The 
     United States must preserve and reserve its military to deter 
     and, if necessary, to resist those violent changes that 
     threaten the peace or our global security. Conversely, we 
     must be willing to accept change, even violent change, that 
     we do not like but that occurs at the international 
     periphery. Thus, while the nation recoiled in horror from the 
     brutalities of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, fundamental 
     questions of national security interest were not adequately 
     confronted and certainly never answered prior to the 
     commitment of a large force of American ground troops.
       One of the notions now in fashion among defense 
     intellectuals is the idea of ``strategic uncertainty.'' In 
     sum, it reflects the belief that because the United States 
     does not know who will challenge its vital interest or 
     exactly where or when such challenges will occur, we are 
     unable to adequately size or shape our military forces. 
     However, if we approach the coming century by focusing on our 
     consistent and central security interests--defense of the 
     homeland; preventing a hegemonic power from dominating 
     Europe, East Asia, and the world's energy supplies; and 
     preserving a degree of international stability--the heralded 
     uncertainty of the post-Cold War era will prove less 
     perplexing. Defining what interests should be protected, 
     while still challenging, will be a more straightforward 
     exercise. and as a nation we will be in a far stronger 
     position to know when we should ask our sons and daughters to 
     fight, shed blood, and sacrifice their lives.

                          ____________________