A rchive Date
[ 26-09-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
Global balance
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
September 26, 2002
Fully a week after President George Bush addressed the UN General Assembly on Sept. 12, his administration presented to the U.S. Congress its first comprehensive foreign policy statement titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States."
In President Bush's view, 9/11 inaugurated a new era in terms of security threats, and confronting it has meant re-thinking America's national security needs.
The threat that defined American foreign policy during the period 1945-91 came from an ideologically divided world organized into two great military alliances armed with nuclear weapons.
In 1950, the Truman administration, following the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test and the communist victory in mainland China, conceptualized this threat and the requisite response in a document known as NSC-68.
NSC-68 became the defining document of American security policy during the Cold War era. Though American nuclear doctrine evolved in response to the growing arsenal of Soviet capability, NSC-68 continued to provide the main scaffolding of American deterrent policy through this period. It is likely that the Bush doctrine now articulated, analogous to NSC-68, may well become the defining document of the post-9/11 era.
America now finds itself in "a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence." But this unique confluence of power and circumstance has not made it "press for unilateral advantage."
On the contrary, America seeks new global balance among great powers, no longer ideologically divided and threatening as they were during the Cold War, to build a world where "freedom, democracy and free enterprise" may prosper.
That these values are also American are not coincidental, for these are the values that triumphed over the ideology of collectivism, authoritarianism, and socialism.
The new threat, exemplified by 9/11, emanates from failed states such as Iraq, instead of conquering states such as the Soviet Union represented. In Bush's words, "We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few."
Moreover, given the probable relationship between failed, or rogue, states and international terror networks, weapons of mass destruction if acquired by these "embittered few" may be used "as weapons of choice" to intimidate, blackmail and terrorize America and its allies. Again, 9/11 removed such threats from the unimaginable and hypothetical, to the probable and likely. Consequently, America "cannot remain idle while dangers gather."
These considerations prompted the Bush administration to opt overtly for a strategy of preemption that, according to many, hitherto had been practised covertly.
The Truman administration in preparing NSC-68 could not anticipate how long the Cold War would endure.
Similarly, President Bush states, the "war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration." Critics will argue this strategy is for the making of, as the American historian Charles A. Beard wrote, "perpetual war for perpetual peace."
But others, including the Bush administration, may rightly argue that by putting rogue states and those that may be tending toward becoming similarly identified - states that "brutalize their own people and squander their natural resources for the personal gain of the rulers" - on notice, America has stepped forward to secure the conditions globally for freedom and free enterprise.
In 1950, the critics of the Truman administration argued that America was being unnecessarily bellicose and provocative towards the Soviet Union. Those critics, in the long curve of history, were proven false.
America then secured freedom and democracy in one half of the globe, or one half of Berlin as that divided city came to symbolize the struggle between freedom and captivity, for freedom eventually to prevail.
President Bush's security policy is founded on America's core beliefs, that "freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity" and "rule of law."
As long as these values enshrined in the American constitution remain firm, America's national security policy more likely than not, as in the past, will continue to keep the world a secure place for human progress and democracy.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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