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| Presider: | John Parker, Washington, D.C., bureau chief, The Economist |
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| Speaker: | Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy, Council on Foreign Relations; author, "Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk |
April 20, 2004
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.
JOHN PARKER: Walter is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow at the Council, and because he’s one of the most well-known sort of engagers in the public debate on foreign policy, I’m not going to say any more by way of introduction to him. Instead of an introduction, I just want to say a couple of things. One is to point out what I thought was a sort of interesting point of a kind of continuity with his previous book. I’m sure you know him as the author of “Special Providence.” And in that book, which is a history of American foreign policy seen through the development of four strands of thinking about foreign policy, he talked about the Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian traditions.
One of the things I like about the new book, it’s got a very intriguing sort of post-September 11th take on this anatomy of American foreign policy. The neo-cons[ervatives] are often described as like neo-Wilsonians, but what Walter does in this book is to suggest actually all four strands have got kind of new qualities. So you know, there are new Wilsonians but there are also new Jeffersonians, new Hamiltonians, and so on. And the neo-cons are a sort of strange coalition of all these new forces. So that was one—those who’ve read “Special Providence” will see a nice continuity between the two books.
The other thing I wanted to do, just as a recommendation for this book, is to read out some of my favorite bon mots from it which I liked. So I quite like: “Within a month of September 11th, the indispensable nation had become the indefensible nation.” [Laughter.] “There’s little doubt the administration believed it was more important to frighten and deter our potential enemies than to reassure its friends,” which I liked. “The WTO [World Trade Organization] has achieved what many political scientists might have thought impossible and found an even more absurd form of government than the United Nations.” [Laughter.] And I like the special one for the French: “France, meanwhile, was intoxicated with its greatest prominence in international affairs since its surrender to [Adolf] Hitler.”[Laughter.] So I think anyone who can write like that deserves our attention.
Anyway—[laughter]—just a few housekeeping rules. Unlike normal Council events, the normal rule that the meeting’s off-the-record and non-attributable will be suspended this evening. We’re on the record. We’ll begin with a sort of 20-, 25- minute discussion between Walter and I, in which I hope we’ll touch on the main themes of the book before opening it up to you all on the—and that will run until 7:30. Please, if you would, turn off cell phones. And that’s the housekeeping.
So, I will begin, and these are very—I wanted to talk in a sort of straightforward way, to begin with, about just what’s actually in the book. So I mentioned one continuity with ”Special Providence.“ There’s actually another one, of course, which is the notion that America is a country which doesn’t merely have a foreign policy; it has like a project, there’s the American project. I wanted to ask, so what is that project? You know, who are the actors that make it different from having a policy? And how has it changed since 9/11?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: OK. Good question. And thanks for doing this, by the way, John. It’s a real labor of love to do these conversations with—
PARKER: [Laughs.]
MEAD: —because you actually have to read the book first. [Laughter.]
PARKER: I’ve read the reviews.
MEAD: [Laughs.] I think the American—well, traditionally people who have looked at foreign policy have kind of tended to look through an unconsciously Eurocentric lens, I think. And they think of [Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von] Bismarck sitting in the ministry’s office, you know, sending a demarche to Denmark or this kind of thing, and foreign policy is seen as something that the state does that’s more or less immune to political pressures from outside.
But if you really look at what the United States does, first of all, our system is so decentralized. Notoriously, the secretary of state isn’t in charge of American foreign policy. And that’s not just true for this administration. But very often presidents are not in charge. You have dueling bureaucracies with different ambitions. [In] Congress, you’ve got two houses, a lot of committees, all of whom are ready to stick in their oars. You’ve got NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] that are constantly pushing and tugging. So it’s very hard to see American foreign policy, as I say in the book, as a boutique; you know, selling a very carefully crafted and selected line of goods to a very select audience. It’s a lot more like a mall with a bunch of different retailers reaching out to a group of different customers.
But also, America’s footprint in the world, if you want to think of it that way, is so much bigger than what the government does, in that, you know, the government starts out with the Internet and it grows into this very large force and it changes the world. Or, you know, [McDonald’s restaurant founder] Roy Kroc develops a new way to franchise fast food and it changes the world. Or American capital markets get more efficient and it changes the world. So to understand what the United States is up to in the world, you have to step back a little bit from a narrow focus on government policy.
But also, since the government, by and large, is the product of the same democratic forces and social forces that are at work at large in society, they’re not unconnected, and the American government and the American society are often working in a very strange, uncoordinated kind of a parallel. So for me, the American project is this larger engagement of the United States with the world.
PARKER: One of the things you talk about is the roots of American foreign policy and the project in economic organizations. And you talk about the way the American economy has changed from what you call kind of a Fordist model to a millennial capitalist model, and that that has changed the development of American foreign policy. Explain more about what I’ve just given you the headline of.
MEAD: OK. Well, one of the things that I think has made the English-speaking world—kept it kind of in an economic leadership role for centuries now—is that there’s a kind of the trade-off between accepting the risks and rigors of free-market capitalism on the one hand, and that causes a lot of social discomfort and unpleasant change; on the other hand, it brings you benefits in terms of new technologies, higher productivity, faster progress.
The English-speaking world, and especially the United States, has usually been pretty comfortable with pushing that trade-off in the more free-market direction, which, on the one hand, gives us historically a kind of a lead, often, compared to the rest of the world, but, on the other hand, means that our society is sometimes pulling the world in directions it doesn’t really want to go.
During a lot of the 20th century, particularly after the Great Depression in this country, there was a time when our choices aligned a little bit more closely with everybody else’s. In [President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s] New Deal and the post-New Deal era, we accepted a lot more regulation of the economy. We were ready to take a sort of a more cautious approach to the risk-reward trade-off of capitalism. We tended to kind of suppress our historic preference for individualism and work through institutions and groups.
And the social system of mass consumption, mass production of that era, which has been called Fordism by a lot of intellectuals—actually, mostly Marxist intellectuals, but hey, why not, it’s a good term—was a big part of the way America led the world after World War II. And so American economic leadership in a place like Europe was a comfortable fit, where European society wanted to go. It was a model that worked for them, worked for us.
But more recently, maybe since the [former U.S. President Ronald] Reagan and [former British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher era more openly, the U.S. has now been moving away from that Fordist model to something I just call in the book millennial capitalism, because you need a name for this new kind of capitalism that seems to be displacing that more regulated one. And it is something new, I think. And as we’ve done that, our economy has become more dynamic. I mean, if you go back to the 1980s, the Americans weren’t just worried about falling behind Japan, they were worried about falling behind Germany. But our economy is now so dynamic, we’re not really worried about falling behind anybody; maybe 30 years out, China, but that’s a very long way off.
On the other hand, the American economic model is now driving everybody else in the world crazy in that as—because the model is so successful, because capital deployed in this way tends to earn a better return than capital deployed in the old fashioned ways, the European countries—and also because of some demographic issues, and so on—European countries, who would just as soon stick with Fordism, are having to change. And so they’re seeing, you know, cutbacks in their social systems, they’re seeing, you know, this raw Anglo-Saxon capitalism coming into their lives, and they resent it. And there’s a sense in which the American model of capitalism is now diverging from the kind of—from where Europeans and others thought was going to be a kind of a permanent convergence; you know, that in the year 2050, we would all be like Sweden. And as that has begun to diverge, it’s getting harder and harder for Americans and Europeans to agree.
PARKER: So if the two sides—or if America is diverging from Europe, and arguably other countries as well, how does it show a kind of global leadership? Is that possible, even?
MEAD: It’s an interesting question. As we stress the exceptionalistic qualities of our own society, you know, our individualism, we start to—you know, whereas in the ’60s and ’70s we were talking about this process of convergence and seeing a kind of a liberal social market as the endpoint of historical development. If we’re now saying we want something radically different from what other people want, this does create some problems. And particularly in our foreign policy, I think it creates problems because very, very often the people who are most attached to the old economic models are the elites around the states of other countries.
So, for example, the old economic model allowed, and in fact encouraged countries to direct credit, allocate credit, or otherwise direct credit to backward regions, backward ethnic groups, to some kind of social purpose. This was—in the developing world, this was a vital state-building tool. And in countries like the European countries, or like Japan or Korea, it was very important in terms of managing social conflict. And what you’re seeing now increasingly is, you know, all of the talk of globalization, international capital, free capital movement, end of regulation, a lot of what this is about is taking power out of the hands of states around the world, and these states are the actors that the American government increasingly depends on, or does depend on for international work. This is the audience for our foreign policy.
So what I think we’re seeing is a crisis—I talk in the book about a succession of elites; that the kinds of people in other countries who, say in the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] countries during the Cold War, or in Korea or in Japan, used to work very hard to minimize friction between the U.S. and their own public opinion and keep the relationship close and keep cooperating, these are now some of the most alienated people in those various countries. And it’s creating a range of foreign policy problems for us that did not start with the [George W.] Bush administration, but have very much complicated it, and I think often surprised it.
PARKER: So those tensions have kind of deep roots in the sort of underlying economic structures, if you like, rather than just in the particular policy choices?
MEAD: Right. Yeah, and it’s somewhat fashionable to say this abrasive Bush diplomacy has caused all these problems. You know, there have certainly been moments when it’s exacerbated problems, but I think we were seeing some of this shaping up in the ’90s and it’s got much deeper roots than Bush.
PARKER: Before we come on to the kind of implications of that, let me just stop—the book has a very nice sort of balance sheet as what you see as the pros and cons of the administration foreign policy so far. Will you take us through that?
MEAD: Yeah, just briefly, it seems to me that they made—most of the really big strategic choices that they made have been, I would say, the right choices. That is to say, first, the war on—is it a war on terror after September 11th? And a lot of very intelligent and thoughtful people say, ”Oh, that’s a terrible, misleading metaphor. It confuses things. This is really more of a police, intelligence, criminal matter, and so we shouldn’t really be using [the term] war.“
I think the administration is reading correctly both public opinion, which demands that this be treated at this level of seriousness, but also the level of threat that this kind of terror produces. This is not an ethnic minority that wants more autonomy. This is—you know, this is a fundamental challenge to the way we do business in the world. You know, if we have to check every container coming into every port for weapons of mass destruction or biological agents and so on, the kind of integrated system of trade and finance, globalized production, and so many other things that we’re—that are essential to the kind of country we want, the kind world we’re trying to build, will be impossible, or the free movement of people around the world and so on.
So they’re correct in seeing that this has to be treated like a war. I think the next big choice they made was whether or not to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I would argue that—in spite of all of the trouble we’ve seen since, that was the right choice. And we were going to have to do it sooner or later, and probably sooner, rather than later.
They’re—they’ve also—behind some of these choices, there’s the choice they’ve made to no longer have a Eurocentric foreign policy. That is, up until really 2001, there was a kind of an operating default assumption in American foreign policy that Europe was the source of both our greatest dangers and our opportunities, as, in fact, it had been for most of our history. That, it seems to me, actually ceased to be true in 1989, but we, to some degree, we went on autopilot until September 11th. And, in fact, in the future, even after the war on terror, it’ll be to the developing world, rather than to Europe, that we will face the greatest dangers in the world, the greatest opportunities, and probably where we will find, over time, our most important allies.
So I think in these ways, they’ve made some right strategic choices. However, if they’re—you know, if they’re strategically correct and have an ability to sort of cut to the chase, they are tactically challenged. This may be the nicest way to put it. There’s the great story of [former U.S. President] Abraham Lincoln when he first met Mary Todd, who he would go on and marry. He—a friend said, ”Well, how did it go?“ He said, ”Well, I went up, and I told her that I wanted to dance with her in the worst way.“ [Laughter.] ”And that’s exactly what I did.“ [Laughter.]
And you know, I think, from the standpoint of execution, they’ve gone about things so badly. I mean, you know, I will only cite one, the failure to prepare better—prepare public opinion and plan better for a complex postwar situation in Iraq. It’s sometimes mind-boggling. And the level of failure at this level, in these tasks, has meant that a lot of the fruits of the solid strategic choice they’ve made have not been achieved.
So that would be my basic balance sheet. Although, in fairness, I have to say I am not very impressed with what the Democrats have been saying, either. It is not clear to me that we’ve yet heard a convincing presentation of an alternative response to September 11th.
PARKER: Would you also look at the continuities with [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton? I wanted to ask about that. I mean, both—basically, both sides have said there’s been a break, either for good or ill—
MEAD: Right.
PARKER: —with the Clintonian record, you know, the end of the holiday from history. And the conservatives say that was necessary. The Democrats say it’s been a source of some of the errors that you’ve been talking about.
MEAD: Right.
PARKER: But you don’t see it that way, as I understand it.
MEAD: I don’t see as much of a—I mean, obviously, on some subjects, there’s a real break. But in general, ask—if you want to see where the Bush administration has had some success, by and large, it’s where the Clinton administration laid a solid foundation. The U.S.-China relationship, I think, is a very good example. Also, for all the talk about a change, U.S.-Russian relations have run on much as they did under Clinton, and relatively benignly, given some of the complications that exist.
You know, you look at some of the places we’re having trouble—you know, South Korea and Indonesia—a lot of the troubles we’re having there are a result of the public outcry and the public response to the Clinton administration’s response to the 1997 [Asian] financial crisis.
The—probably the biggest commonality is the disastrous, catastrophic collapse of the peace process in the Middle East under the Clinton administration [that] set the stage for some of—a lot of the problems we’ve had in the Middle East today would not be nearly as grave or troubling if that Oslo peace process [that grew out of secret Israeli-Palestinian talks in 1993] were still ticking along. I still don’t understand why the Clinton people thought that this thing had to be—you know, you had to risk everything, risk breaking this peace process in order to bring in a final solution by [the inauguration date of the next president on] January 20th, 2001. I still don’t understand what was intrinsic to the peace process or to the American national interest that made that necessary. But the fact that we lost a 30-year peace process, a bipartisan effort, and have nothing now is a big part of the Bush administration’s policy problems in the Middle East. Obviously, the failure—[laughs]—to deal with al Qaeda created some of Bush’s problems.
But the alienation with France was also beginning in the ’90s. You may remember that it was France that sort of refused to sign on to [former U.S. Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright’s democratic declaration in Warsaw. And, as I point out in the book, it was in ’95 that [French President] Jacques Chirac declared that the position of the leader of the free world was vacant, and he, in all humility, was prepared to assume it. [Laughter.] So—
PARKER: It’s good that we have people just waiting there, ready to take over—
MEAD: [Laughs.] It’s so helpful to know that, should you falter, there are others behind ready to take the lead. But I think more than that, the holiday from history in some ways didn’t end, at least mentally, for the Bush administration after September 11th, in that there was still this notion of, I call it briefly a monothelete history. That’s like—that’s a name for an ancient Christian heresy that I’ve been waiting for decades to find a way to use.
PARKER: The time has come. [Laughs.]
MEAD: Right. But it means that there’s only—not just a unipolar world system, but monothelete, only one will operating; if America made up its mind and put down its feet, its foot, it would get what it wanted. And the Clinton people believed that our entrancing soft power would make everyone irresistibly follow. I’m oversimplifying. And the Bush people said, “If you lead, they will follow.” You know, if you were forceful and firm in the way you go after Iraq, they will come. And you know, they—we’ve built it, and they haven’t come. So there was a kind of a—I mean, it’s my own generation, so I’ll say it, but a narcissistic boomer hubris in both administrations that I don’t think we’ve still completely purged from our thinking, and I think it might be a good idea if we could do it.
PARKER: But look, if the roots of the divergence between America and everyone else go deep into, you know, the structure of economies and into recent history, in a way that’s a very kind of a pessimistic basis for thinking about the future, right? If we’re diverging, it doesn’t—sounds as if we’re going to continue to diverge. So I wanted to ask, you know, you come on to a series of kind of policies and positions, almost kind of temperamental changes that the Bush administration, you know, could, in your view, usefully do. Maybe you could talk about that. What forward containment, for example?
MEAD: Right. Well, at the end of the book I do try to be prescriptive. And you know, that’s when you realize just how hard foreign policy is, when you try to suggest alternatives. And what I want to—I want to compare our situation now in the world to the one we faced at the start of the Cold War.
The war on terror, in many ways, reminds me of the Cold War. And let’s not forget, the Cold War was a metaphorical war, just like the war on terror. The U.S. and Soviet armies weren’t campaigning. A lot of what we did in the Cold War was political, was intelligence. It was containing communist ideology, particularly in the early years when communism was a viable contender for taking over power in countries like France and Italy and even, I think, briefly, in Germany. And trying—and even if we had failed to stop the progress of the ideology, it wouldn’t have mattered how many tanks we had in the Fulda Gap [the anticipated point of attack by communist forces in Europe during the Cold War]. And so this is not so dissimilar to what we face now, in some ways.
Then, also, the fact that the Soviets, in a sense, became a supra-state by having a nuclear deterrent that meant that we couldn’t do foreign policy in the classic way that rival great powers do and fight and duke it out and win. And in the same way, you know, now al Qaeda and the movement it is part of are, you know, infrastate things. They are lower than, but they’re still—we still can’t—we can’t send our army to al Qaeda and defeat it, so we’re forced to think of our war in other ways.
I think thinking of a new kind of a containment approach to terror may be a way to bridge the gap between the metaphorical nature of the conflict, but also the very real and existential stakes there are. It may also help make it a little bit easier to explain to our friends and allies and to neutrals why we do what we do and what our policy is.
And I would just suggest that if you think about containment now, as in the Cold War, there were really three dimensions to it. One was the military containment of the Soviet Union. Now it would be really dealing very aggressively with the power of these terror movements to hurt us—that is, disrupting their organizations, cutting their links to states, reducing their ability to operate, move money around, you know, isolating and diminishing their power to arm.
Then there’s a kind of a political containment, which is the movement against this fanatic ideology, which I really do think is a new form of fascism. I follow [author] Paul Berman’s arguments there. And we need to work in civil society—you know, in the 1930s, the United States government had no idea that it would ever be caring about the composition of trade union movements in other countries. By the early 1950s, a communist couldn’t go near a union hall in west Europe without the United States or one of its allies, you know, quivering and really—and thinking and acting and engaging. And I think we’re going to have to look at this new ideological opponent in the same way and look at some of our old tools that we used against it.
And finally, we have to talk about containing, in the sense of no, we can’t allow a terror movement to take power—take state power anywhere. We saw what happened in Afghanistan. If Osama bin Laden tried to take power in Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t allow that to happen. And that’s—that can be a very grim and ugly way of thinking, but it seems to me that we need to look—we look at what Afghanistan turned into under the Taliban as a large terror camp, a real threat to world peace. Any other state under the influence of this movement would be an unacceptable international reality, I think.
But beyond that, we have to be thinking in terms of—you know, getting back to this problem of millennial capitalism versus Fordism—how do we rebuild a sense in the world that the path the Americans want to take, this path of developing capitalism and extending it and exploring new potentials within it is the right path, is the best path? And, you know, we need to find—I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but I talk about in the book the need to find ways to make the power of this—the increased power of this new form of capitalism work better to meet the ordinary needs of ordinary people, to do things to attack poverty, and other things more effectively than Fordism ever could. And one example I talk about is whether international capital markets can be organized in ways to, say, support Fannie Mae-like organizations [that supplies mortgages to home buyers] in South Africa or Turkey or other developing countries so that this new kind of market-driven capitalism and large flows of international finance can begin to play a more benign role in societies and become more popular.
That’s basically an outline. And a good set of questions, because I think you led us through pretty well.
PARKER: Well, let me throw it open to the floor now. If I might ask you, I think there are people with microphones, so if you could wait until the microphone appears, maybe you could stand up and give us your name and attribution. And, if you could, please try and ask a question rather than make a statement. The first hand that went up was over on that side, just there.
QUESTIONER: I’m Paula Stern. My question is difficult to pose, for me at least. But your comparison of the war on terrorism and containment, it seems to me that the success of containment had many components, which you’ve spelled out. But one which I didn’t hear as strongly as I think it should be emphasized is that of the importance of our allies in rebuilding [western Europe under] the Marshall Plan and everything else in rebuilding Europe, in particular.
And you talk about an economic component in this war on terrorism with your reference to South Africa and Turkey, but I kind of think of the center of this war on terrorism being, if you will, the Middle East. And I’m wondering if there isn’t some more important differences between the war on terrorism and containment? In other words, we are not garnering our allies as strongly and as assiduously as we did after World War II. And secondly, how do you see—
MEAD: You mean our European allies or—
QUESTIONER: Yes. Yes.
MEAD: OK.
QUESTIONER: And secondly, how do you see the Middle East economically developing? It is the least globalized of any region in the world, it seems to me. It has been the least of all nations participating in the world economic system.
MEAD: OK. Well, two good questions. On the question of working with our allies, I do actually—obviously, in these answers I can only skim over, even though it’s a very short and very readable book, by the way—[laughter]—and cheap too! [Laughter.] And really suitable for—
PARKER: [Laughs.] And the film rights are really, you know, a bargain!
MEAD: Right. Suitable for gifts. Let me just say that. So don’t feel that only one or two is enough. [Laughter.] But—oh, and did I say this is the first day it’s officially on sale? So any books bought today will have that, like, day-of-issue date autographed in them, if you’d like to come to me. And that could really bring you something on e-Bay one of these days!
But I do think it’s necessary to work more effectively with the Europeans. It’s going to be a little tricky because the Cold War was about them, so it mattered an awful lot what—you know, in a sense, it mattered more to us in 1948 what Germany thought of our policy than it does today. But I would definitely agree that we’re going to be much better off the more closely we can work with them. However, our beloved European friends and allies sometimes misunderstand the degree to which—you know, in Europe the idea is that if the U.S. cooperates with Europe, that puts the mantle of legitimacy on our foreign policy. This is not the case necessarily in the Middle East, where what they see is where all the crusaders, where all the imperialists are coming in. So it’s a little bit trickier how we do some of this.
And then in terms of the economic development, absolutely, we need to start—I would say what we really need to start doing in the Middle East is we’re going to have to start looking at the old set of tools that we used in Europe in the Cold War, particularly in the early years of the Cold War, and start thinking about how can some of these tools be modified for use in the Middle East. To do this, you know, sometimes people will tell you, well, you have to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue before you can do anything else. Well, that means you can’t do anything because, you know, I’m sure it won’t be a surprise to many people here, but that’s not going to be solved quickly. But we do need to find a way to take some of the curse off us there, and I make some suggestions about that in the book in fact.
PARKER: But what are these—what is the tool kit from the early part of the Cold War?
MEAD: Well, I would say one of them is promoting regional economic integration and cooperation, certainly democratization. You know, I think a lot of these ideas are coming out under the heading of the [Bush administration’s] Greater Middle East Initiative. Right now the Greater Middle East Initiative is—you know, it’s a label on an empty box. You know, it’s the label we’re all using for the range of much deeper policies that we would like to see in the Middle East.
But I think all of—you know, Marshall Plan, well that’s maybe, you know, maybe Saudi Arabia doesn’t need that much new funds for us, but definitely working on a regional vision, democratization, economic modernization, those are all very important things. And again, trying to take the worst of the edge without breaking with Israel, which, I think, would not do us any good or actually make us any real friends in the region, finding a way to seem, not less pro-Israel, but less anti-Palestinian, more pro-Palestinian. And I think The New York Times is going to run a piece tomorrow where some of those ideas I get into, so I’ll leave that for the morning.
QUESTIONER: OK.
PARKER: Yes. The gentleman here, third row.
QUESTIONER: Thank you very much. Thanks. David Apgar, Corporate Executive Board. One of John’s lines of questions seemed to suggest that divergence is not the only explanation of discord, specifically Euro-U.S. discord. It gives me an excuse to ask about a line of argument that I know you thought about; the question will be, why have you found it not so valid and not so useful? And it’s that a lot of the deep roots of discord might, in fact, be new to this administration, and they might, in fact, have to do with a strong movement toward structural economic convergence. The argument would run that the Bush administration has turned away from the consumerist roots or structure of the Clinton economy and the market capitalism of the Reagan economy and has moved toward a corporatism, so would run the argument, that looks an awful lot like, well, Europe. And what happens when you pit two corporatist groups astride the Atlantic Ocean against one another? They start arguing about everything. I know you’ve thought about that. It would be interesting to hear, you know, where some of the weaknesses are in the convergence line of argument for—or explanation for a lot of the argument that’s—a lot of the discord that we see.
MEAD: Well, actually, I haven’t thought about it very much, because it doesn’t seem that probable to me. [Laughter.] You know, I mean, I look at, for example, the attitudes toward corporate takeovers on both sides of the Atlantic, and I see a radically different approach. Or I look at the question of national champions and industries. We still have a sort of a few areas where we do that—you know, our ridiculous rules about airlines being one of them—but it’s much more a kind of a central element of the way they do things.
You know, the Bush administration is certainly trying to be helpful toward large corporations. Those of you familiar with the Republican party won’t think this is a radically new approach, necessarily. Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton [the first U.S. secretary of the Treasury] is coming out in a couple of months. This is not new. And by the way, it’s an excellent book. I probably shouldn’t plug someone else’s book at this, but it really is very good.
But my point is that, in fact, you know, you look at the attitudes toward public shareholding, you look at just a whole range of things where American corporations are sort of more, you know, velociraptors, and European corporations are more, you know, placid and herbivorous, to a certain degree. It’s a very—they may both be corporations, but they have very different approaches to some very basic things, and I don’t really see that much convergence between them.
PARKER: OK. The gentleman in the third row again.
QUESTIONER: Joe Onek, Constitution Project. Two questions that I, at least, think are related. Question No. 1: How can you fight a war on the many fronts that you talk about and, at the same time, have massive, massive tax cuts?
And secondly and relatedly, do you really believe that American-style capitalism is going to go into countries like Africa and Turkey, as opposed to China? Doesn’t—if you really want that kind of investment in those countries, doesn’t that rely on government funding and European-type dirigisme, not on naked American capitalism?
MEAD: No. I think—I don’t, you know, I don’t know about whether we can indefinitely afford the high expenses of the war on terror with low taxes. I mean, we’ll have to sort of see how that goes. I mean, I think you might argue that the new Medicare entitlement for prescription drug coverage is long-term sort of a more frightening budgetary development than the war on terror.
And certainly, you know, if you look at—if you look back at the Cold War experience, we for some—you know, we had 6 to 8 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] for much of the Cold War going to defense. We’re still at only about 4 percent now. So, in that sense, we’re still below our average level of military expenses as a percentage of GDP. So, I don’t actually see the costs of the war on terror being the driving element in the budget debate. You know, the levels of taxation are another question.
In terms of the movement of capital, I think what you—you know, there certainly will be elements—you know, American capitalism is not as crazily laissez faire as people—you know, and certainly the Bush policy hasn’t been. You know, it’s always more a question of types of—you know, people misunderstand, I think, the shift from the Fordism to millennial capitalism. And one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from labels like laissez faire and so on is to avoid falling into this pit.
If you go back to, say, 1900, you know, sort of an era of much more laissez faire capitalism, in some ways, the federal budget was 3 percent of GDP. Instead of the Federal Reserve, the de facto central bank of the United States was the House of Morgan, a frankly private institution. There was essentially no transfer of finances through the federal budget to the poor and so on. We are not going back to that.
If you think about, you know, the free trade and so on, it’s creating new transnational forms of regulation that didn’t exist. The goals of regulation are changing, not so much as to protect people from the vagaries of the market as to allow more people access to markets and so on and so forth. But it’s not a sort of rapid deregulation, you know, or a total destruction of all regulation. There are forms of regulation that seem to be characteristic in this new economy.
So I would actually argue that there will be forms of regulation, there will be forms of subsidy and other things that will be suited to the emerging political economy, and they will, in fact—they can, if properly structured, enable a greater flow of funds to some of these other countries.
PARKER: The gentleman to your right who had his hand up.
QUESTIONER: Charles Battaglia. You indicated a need for a better approach on ideology here. And on Sunday here, the gentleman whose seat you’re sitting in here, Dr. [Henry] Kissinger [former U.S. secretary of state], suggested it took about several centuries of incubation in Europe for democracy to develop here and—[inaudible] —the United States, and he then drew a direct conclusion that we probably could do the same much more quickly—if I read him right—in the Middle East. And the question I really have, is democracy the right approach for us at this time in the Middle East? We seem to be approaching on the lines of militant democracy: you better like this here because there’s no other choice. Would you comment on that, please?
MEAD: Sure. Well, let me first just point out, in case anybody doesn’t know, that Dr. Kissinger and I have an arrangement. He doesn’t clear his speeches with me, and I don’t clear mine with him. [Laughter.] So the Kissinger chair does not imply any amount of agreement, or disagreement, for that matter, between us.
Promotion of democracy is always difficult. I tend to sympathize with [Newsweek International Editor] Fareed Zakaria’s take on this and see the role of pluralism and liberalism as being important building blocks for democracy. But having said that, you know, the Iranian government, much as I think all of us dislike the current state of that regime, is not as far from a pluralistic democracy as one might think. Turkey has made remarkable progress in a very short period of time. I mean, Japan certainly had little serious—a smattering of parliamentary experience before 1945, but no real democratic tradition. And there are countries like Thailand, which, despite some current problems, there does seem to be an emergent culture of democratic value.
So I don’t want to be as hopeless as to say that, you know, what we’re going to have to do for democracy promotion is sit around and wait 300 years, occasionally maybe dropping leaflets with the writings of John Locke over the realms of darkness. [Laughter.] But definitely I think we’re going to have to be—I don’t think you can do anything in politics that is serious and important in a kind of a rigid, cookie-cutter sort of a way. And you’re going to have to be flexible, and you’re going to have to at some times be more patient than you would like to be; at some times you may be forced to be more pushy than prudence would counsel. It’s going to be a mix. And one of the real roles of national leadership is going to be explaining the twists and turns that our democratization policy is inevitably going to take, and to explain those twists and turns both to domestic and to foreign audiences.
PARKER: The gentleman right at the front here on your left.
QUESTIONER: Garry Mitchell from The Mitchell Report. I wanted to come back to one of your early observations about, to paraphrase, that the Bush administration has sort of gotten it right on strategy, but tactically has been challenged. And I want to frame another perspective on that and ask you the thing about it this way, which is that, in medicine, to be right on diagnosis and wrong on execution can be fatal. [Laughter.] And likewise in business, to be right on strategy and wrong on execution can be fatal. Looking at what’s apparently actually happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, how do you net out on getting it right on the big things but wrong on execution?
MEAD: Well, I think where—I think the Bush administration—I won’t talk as much about Afghanistan because I think the problems are quite different. But I think the Bush administration went into Iraq with a very large margin of safety. They’ve demonstrated how large that margin of safety was by how many errors they’ve committed without completely destroying the chances for a reasonably positive outcome in Iraq. That margin—[inaudible]—the influence of the Bush administration over the political future of Iraq is less now than it was six months ago and nine months ago and one year ago.
You know, fortunately for the Bush administration and, you know, for the Iraqis, and for the world, there are some positive features in what’s going on in Iraq—or rather, in what exists in Iraq, in that you have the Shi’a majority not completely committed to a clerical solution, but moving in that direction. But you also have Kurds who are armed and are not going to—you know, will not give up the current protections and freedom they’ve got without some kind of a deal. And [there is] a Sunni insurgency that—much as all of us might disapprove of it—demands a political, rather than a military, solution, suggesting that the emerging Shi’a majority rule of Iraq will have to be conditioned—you know, will have to make political deals and compromises with rival groups in the country that are the basis for a system that is pluralistic.
I think, also from the U.S. standpoint, it seems, at least at this point, still clear that the kind of state that [influential Shiite cleric Ali al-]Sistani and the people around him want is a very different one from a Khomeinist state [such as Iran]. That’s very good. And in fact, if they create a model, even if it’s a little bit more clerical than we would like it to be, but is quite—is freer than the Iranian model and different, that may actually have very good ramifications in Iran.
So I don’t think at this moment that you can sort of—that the time has come when you can say the Bush administration has gone into Iraq, made a disaster, there is no good way out, and now we have to kind of wring our hands and suffer. We’re not there yet. I don’t say that they don’t have the capacity to make some more mistakes that could get us to that point; I don’t think you can rule anything out. But they have not yet exhausted their margin of error.
PARKER: Right behind you, about four rows back. There, yes.
QUESTIONER: Allen Wendt. You said in your introductory remarks that, as we look ahead, American foreign policy is destined to be less and less Eurocentric. And yet you identified a strategic threat that seems to lie outside North America and Europe. As we face that strategic threat, why would we not find natural allies in Europe, and why are we destined to find more such allies outside of Europe? If you could elaborate on that point.
MEAD: OK, sure. Well, I don’t say that Europe won’t be an important source of allies. And I actually do say in the book that, in the future, the degree of the closeness of relations between Europe and the U.S. will be the degree to which we succeed in finding a common approach to issues in the Middle East. But a difference now is they’re important to us because of how they can help us in the Middle East, not because what happens in Europe is the center of our world. So they’ve become a secondary focus for us.
Looking even further ahead in the world, if you want to ask yourself, you know, what are the two strategic threats, potential threats, that the U.S. faces in the 21st century? One is, you know, what we’re seeing now on terror, and the other is the potential—which I, for one, don’t think is inevitable, but you know, you have to think about it—of a Chinese challenge to the American system. And actually, then you think, well, you know, where will the Europeans be on that one? And the answer is sitting it out in the bleachers, you know, and perhaps selling arms to both sides on a neutral and impartial basis.
There is one country in the world which hates the idea that China would be geopolitically dominant in Asia and also hates the idea of fanatical Islam dominating the Middle East. That’s India. So you can make a solid argument that, at least potentially, in the 21st century, India may well be the most important strategic partner of the United States, because we have more points of real solid contact there.
On the other hand, I think you can make a good—you can make a very good argument that it would be China, because if China and the United States can reach an agreement about how things proceed, we will be far more concerned to keep China happy than we are to keep France happy, or Denmark even.
PARKER: Thank you. Right behind you.
QUESTIONER: I’m Herman Cohen of SAIS [School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University]. Again, on your Eurocentric statement, do you think that, after [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, we’ll lose the U.K. and the special relationship?
MEAD: Well, I think, you know, it’s actually the U.K.’s Euro-skepticism. You know, in some ways, I think Tony Blair was—his original plans were to lead Europe into the heart—the U.K. into the heart of Europe sort of, and the kisses he was giving the United States were kisses of farewell. And I think events took him in—maybe in a slightly different direction, like radically different direction, from the one he’d originally planned.
But those of you who may have missed the news today, he’s having to put—he’s decided to put the EU [European Union] constitution to a referendum in Britain. [There is] a lot of speculation about what that means in terms of British politics, but I think it—my guess is it’s not very likely to pass. I think the polls are showing something like 15 percent support now, which is roughly equal to the Greek Cypriot support for their referendum. [Scattered laughter.] You know, things can change and Blair is a very effective politician, but I don’t think—I think Britain may still be hanging out on the fringes of Europe when he steps down from the prime ministership, and that would just—that would more or less force them into having some kind of a relationship with us, because otherwise it would just be too lonely and cold out there.
PARKER: I think we have time for a couple more questions. A couple if they’re very quick. There’s one hand at the—right here. Just sort of—just to your left, and then—yeah.
QUESTIONER: Albert Levin. Do you see growing incoherence in American foreign policy-making and execution as a major problem to carry forward the kind of designs you dealt with?
MEAD: Well, I think that in the ’90s we saw—and I was writing about this, actually, in ”Special Providence,“ and comparing the ’90s in some ways to the ’30s as a time when Americans really didn’t have a consensus about the strategic nature of the world that they lived in, and there was a tendency for our strategic thinking to get very sloppy and very diffuse. And I speculated in there that, you know, this could continue until some external shock forces us to refocus and debate. I think that has happened. And what we’re seeing now, I think, is yes, a great deal—you know, some of the deepest debates in American foreign policy since the 1940s over the beginning of the Cold War. And they’re very sharp debates, very profound differences of views. But the country is more or less united in the belief that we do have to get this right and come up with an approach.
It’s interesting to see how much the [presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry campaign so far seems to be moving back into the Cold War model, in which the Democrats are strategically more or less aligned and have some tactical differences with Republicans on how to fight the war. So Kerry is talking about—if anything, he’s attacking Bush right now for not prosecuting the war in Iraq vigorously enough—more troops, you know, more political initiatives, and we must stay the course.
So I would actually see some of the disarray and disputatiousness now as part of the process by which a country like ours [that is] very diverse with a little of different interest groups, cultural groups, political ideas, and so on, fumbles its way toward an effective consensus. At least I hope that’s what’s happening, because we’re in trouble if it’s not.
PARKER: I think we probably will have to make that the last question. I’m sorry, we’re out of time. Would you all join me in thanking Walter very much for a fascinating talk? [Applause.] Further reading available tomorrow in The New York Times. And it’s a great book. Thank you.
MEAD: Thanks. Appreciate it.
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