by David Armstrong
Congressional Record
October 10, 2002


Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and
few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken
several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several
ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been
consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name,
and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let
us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan.
The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of
Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense
under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like "Leaves of Grass," a
perpetually evolving work. It was the controversial Defense Planning Guidance
draft of 1992 ­ from which Cheney, unconvincingly, tried to distance himself ­
and it was the somewhat less aggressive revised draft of that same year. This
June it was a presidential lecture in the form of a commencement address at West
Point, and in July it was leaked to the press as yet another Defense Planning
Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld). It
will take its ultimate form, though, as America's new national security strategy
­ and Cheney et al. will experience what few writers have even dared dream:
their words will become our reality.

The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is
unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the
United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new
rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion
over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more
powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.
The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being
sold now as an answer to the "new realities" of the post-September 11 world,
even as it was sold previously as the answer to the new realities of the
post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has always been the right answer, no
matter how different the questions.

Cheney's unwavering adherence to the Plan would be amusing, and maybe a little
sad, except that it is now our plan. In its pages are the ideas that we now act
upon every day with the full might of the United States military. Strangely, few
critics have noted that Cheney's work has a long history, or that it was once
quite unpopular, or that it was created in reaction to circumstances that are
far removed from the ones we now face. But Cheney is a well-known action man.
One has to admire, in a way, the Babe Ruth-like sureness of his political work.
He pointed to center field ten years ago, and now the ball is sailing over the
fence.

Before the Plan was about domination it was about money. It took shape in late
1989, when the Soviet threat was clearly on the decline, and, with it, public
support for a large military establishment. Cheney seemed unable to come to
terms with either new reality. He remained deeply suspicious of the Soviets and
strongly resisted all efforts to reduce military spending. Democrats in Congress
jeered his lack of strategic vision, and a few within the Bush Administration
were whispering that Cheney had become an irrelevant factor in structuring a
response to the revolutionary changes taking place in the world.

More adaptable was the up-and-coming General Colin Powell, the newly appointed
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Ronald Reagan's national security
adviser, Powell had seen the changes taking place in the Soviet Union firsthand
and was convinced that the ongoing transformation was irreversible. Like Cheney,
he wanted to avoid military cuts, but he knew they were inevitable. The best he
could do was minimize them, and the best way to do that would be to offer a new
security structure that would preserve American military capabilities despite
reduced resources.

Powell and his staff believed that a weakened Soviet Union would result in
shifting alliances and regional conflict. The United States was the only nation
capable of managing the forces at play in the world; it would have to remain the
preeminent military power in order to ensure the peace and shape the emerging
order in accordance with American interests. U.S. military strategy, therefore,
would have to shift from global containment to managing less-well-defined
regional struggles and unforeseen contingencies. To do this, the United States
would have to project a military "forward presence" around the world; there
would be fewer troops but in more places. This plan still would not be cheap,
but through careful restructuring and superior technology, the job could be done
with 25 percent fewer troops. Powell insisted that maintaining superpower status
must be the first priority of the U.S. military. "We have to put a shingle
outside our door saying, 'Superpower Lives Here,' no matter what the Soviets
do," he said at the time. He also insisted that the troop levels be proposed
were the bare minimum necessary to do so. This concept would come to be known as
the "Base Force."

Powell's work on the subject proved timely. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9,
1989, and five days later Powell had his new strategy ready to present to
Cheney. Even as decades of repression were ending in Eastern Europe, however,
Cheney still could not abide even the force and budget reductions Powell
proposed. Yet he knew that cuts were unavoidable. Having no alternative of his
own to offer, therefore, he reluctantly encouraged Powell to present his ideas
to the president. Powell did so the next day; Bush made no promises but
encouraged him to keep at it.

Less encouraging was the reaction of Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of
defense for policy. A lifelong proponent of the unilateralist, maximum-force
approach, he shared Cheney's skepticism about the Eastern Bloc and so put his
own staff to work on a competing plan that would somehow accommodate the
possibility of Soviet backsliding.

As Powell and Wolfowitz worked out their strategies, Congress was losing
patience. New calls went up for large cuts in defense spending in light of the
new global environment. The harshest critique of Pentagon planning came from a
usually dependable ally of the military establishment, Georgia Democrat Sam
Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee. Nunn told fellow senators
in March 1990 that there was a "threat blank" in the administration's proposed
$295 billion defense budget and that the Pentagon's "basic assessment of the
overall threat to our national security" was "rooted in the past." The world had
changed and yet the "development of a new military strategy that responds to the
changes in the threat has not yet occurred." Without that response, no dollars
would be forthcoming.

Nunn's message was clear. Powell and Wolfowitz began filling in the blanks.
Powell started promoting a Zen-like new rationale for his Base Force approach.
With the Soviets rapidly becoming irrelevant, Powell argued, the United States
could no longer assess its military needs on the basis of known threats.
Instead, the Pentagon should focus on maintaining the ability to address a wide
variety of new and unknown challenges. This shift from a "threat based"
assessment of military requirements to a "capability based" assessment would
become a key theme of the Plan. The United States would move from countering
Soviet attempts at dominance to ensuring its own dominance. Again, this project
would not be cheap.

Powell's argument, circular though it may have been, proved sufficient to hold
off Congress. Winning support among his own colleagues, however, proved more
difficult. Cheney remained deeply skeptical about the Soviets, and Wolfowitz was
only slowly coming around. To account for future uncertainties, Wolfowitz
recommended drawing down U.S. forces to roughly the levels proposed by Powell,
but doing so at a much slower pace; seven years as opposed to the four Powell
suggested. He also built in a "crisis response/reconstitution" clause that would
allow for reversing the process if events in the Soviet Union, or elsewhere,
turned ugly.

With these now elements in place, Cheney saw something that might work. By
combining Powell's concepts with those of Wolfowitz, he could counter
congressional criticism that his proposed defense budget was out of line with
the new strategic reality, while leaving the door open for future force
increases. In late June, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Cheney presented their plan to
the president, and within as few weeks Bush was unveiling the new strategy.
Bush laid out the rationale for the Plan in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, on
August 2, 1990. He explained that since the danger of global war had
substantially receded, the principal threats to American security would emerge
in unexpected quarters. To counter those threats, he said, the United States
would increasingly base the size and structure of its forces on the need to
respond to "regional contingencies" and maintain a peacetime military presence
overseas. Meeting that need would require maintaining the capability to quickly
deliver American forces to any "corner of the globe," and that would mean
retaining many major weapons systems then under attack in Congress as overly
costly and unnecessary, including the "Star Wars" missile-defense program.
Despite those massive outlays, Bush insisted that the proposed restructuring
would allow the United States to draw down its active forces by 25 percent in
the years ahead, the same figure Powell had projected ten months earlier.
The Plan's debut was well timed. By a remarkable coincidence, Bush revealed it
the very day Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.

The Gulf War temporarily reduced the pressure to cut military spending. It also
diverted attention from some of the Plan's less appealing aspects. In addition,
it inspired what would become one of the Plan's key features: the use of
"overwhelming force" to quickly defeat enemies, a concept since dubbed the
Powell Doctrine.

Once the Iraqi threat was "contained," Wolfowitz returned to his obsession with
the Soviets, planning various scenarios involved possible Soviet intervention in
regional conflicts. The failure of the hard-liner coup against Gorbachev in
August 1991, however, made it apparent that such planning might be unnecessary.
Then, in late December, just as the Pentagon was preparing to put the Plan in
place, the Soviet Union collapsed.

With the Soviet Union gone, the United States had a choice. It could capitalize
on the euphoria of the moment by nurturing cooperative relations and developing
multilateral structures to help guide the global realignment then taking place;
or it could consolidate its power and pursue a strategy of unilateralism and
global dominance. It chose the latter course.

In early 1992, as Powell and Cheney campaigned to win congressional support for
their augmented Base Force plan, a new logic entered into their appeals. The
United States, Powell told members of the House Armed Services Committee,
required "sufficient power" to "deter any challenger from ever dreaming of
challenging us on the world stage." To emphasize the point, he cast the United
States in the role of street thug. "I want to be the bully on the block," he
said, implanting in the mind of potential opponents that "there is no future in
trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States."

As Powell and Cheney were making this new argument in their congressional
rounds, Wolfowitz was busy expanding the concept and working to have it
incorporated into U.S. policy. During the early months of 1992, Wolfowitz
supervised the preparation of an internal Pentagon policy statement used to
guide military officials in the preparation of their forces, budgets, and
strategies. The classified document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance,
depicted a world dominated by the United States, which would maintain its
superpower status through a combination of positive guidance and overwhelming
military might. the image was one of a heavily armed City on a Hill.

The DPG stated that the "first objective" of U.S. defense strategy was "to
prevent the re-emergence of a new rival." Achieving this objective required that
the United States "prevent any hostile power from dominating a region" of
strategic significance. America's new mission would be to convince allies and
enemies alike "that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more
aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."

Another new theme was the use of preemptive military force. The options, the DPG
noted, ranged from taking preemptive military action to head off a nuclear,
chemical, or biological attack to "punishing" or "threatening punishment of"
aggressors "through a variety of means," including strikes against
weapons-manufacturing facilities.

The DPG also envisioned maintaining a substantial U.S. nuclear arsenal while
discouraging the development of nuclear programs in other countries. It depicted
a "U.S.-led system of collective security" that implicitly precluded the need
for rearmament of any king by countries such as Germany and Japan. And it called
for the "early introduction" of a global missile-defense system that would
presumably render all missile-launched weapons, including those of the United
States, obsolete. (The United States would, of course, remain the world's
dominant military power on the strength of its other weapons systems.)
The story, in short, was dominance by way of unilateral action and military
superiority. While coalitions ­ such as the one formed during the Gulf War ­
held "considerable promise for promoting collective action," the draft DPG
stated, the United States should expect future alliances to be "ad hoc
assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many
cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished."
It was essential to create "the sense that the world order is ultimately backed
by the U.S." and essential that America position itself "to act independently
when collective action cannot be orchestrated" or in crisis situation requiring
immediate action. "While the U.S. cannot become the world's policeman," the
document said, "we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing
selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our
allies or friends." Among the interests the draft indicated the United States
would defend in this manner were "access to vital raw materials, primarily
Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic
missiles, [and] threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism."

The DPC was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. Critics on both the left
and the right attacked it immediately. Then-presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
portrayed candidate a "blank check" to America's allies by suggesting the United
States would "go to war to defend their interests." Bill Clinton's deputy
campaign manager, George Stephanopoulos, characterized it as an attempt by
Pentagon officials to "find an excuse for big defense budgets instead of
downsizing." Delaware Senator Joseph Biden criticized the Plan's vision of a
"Pax Americana, a global security system where threats to stability are
suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power." Even those who found the
document's stated goals commendable feared that its chauvinistic tone could
alienate many allies. Cheney responded by attempting to distance himself from
the Plan. The Pentagon's spokesman dismissed the leaked document as a "low-level
draft" and claimed that Cheney had not seen it. Yet a fifteen-page section
opened by proclaiming that it constituted "definitive guidance from the
Secretary of Defense."

Powell took a more forthright approach to dealing with the flap: he publicly
embraced the DPG's core concept. In a TV interview, he said he believed it was
"just fine" that the United States reign as the world's dominant military power.
"I don't think we should apologize for that," he said. Despite bad reviews in
the foreign press, Powell insisted that America's European allies were "not
afraid" of U.S. military might because it was "power that could be trusted" and
"will not be misused."

Mindful that the draft DPG's overt expression of U.S. dominance might not fly,
Powell in the same interview also trotted out a new rationale for the original
Base Force plan. He argued that in a post-Soviet world, filled with new dangers,
the United States needed the ability to fight on more than one front at a time.
"One of the most destabilizing things we could do," he said, "is to cut our
forces so much that if we're tied up in one area of the world ..... and we are
not seen to have the ability to influence another area of the world, we might
invite just the sort of crisis we're trying to deter." This two-war strategy
provided a possible answer to Nunn's "threat blank." One unknown enemy wasn't
enough to justify lavish defense budgets, but two unknown enemies might do the
trick.

Within a few weeks the Pentagon had come up with a more comprehensive response
to the DPG furor. A revised version was leaked to the press that was
significantly less strident in tone, though only slightly less strident in fact.
While calling for the United States to prevent "any hostile power from
dominating a region critical to our interests," the new draft stressed that
America would act in concert with its allies ­ when possible. It also suggested
the United Nations might take an expanded role in future political, economic,
and security matters, a concept conspicuously absent from the original draft.
The controversy died down, and, with a presidential campaign under way, the
Pentagon did nothing to stir it up again. Following Bush's defeat, however, the
Plan reemerged. In January 1993, in his very last days in office. Cheney
released a final version. The newly titled Defense Strategy for the 1990s
retained the soft touch of the revised draft DPG as well as its darker themes.
The goal remained to preclude "hostile competitors from challenging our critical
interests" and preventing the rise of a new super-power. Although it expressed a
"preference" for collective responses in meeting such challenges, it made clear
that the United States would play the lead role in any alliance. Moreover, it
noted that collective action would "not always be timely." Therefore, the United
States needed to retain the ability to "act independently, if necessary." To do
so would require that the United States maintain its massive military
superiority. Others were not encouraged to follow suit. It was kinder, gentler
dominance, but it was dominance all the same. And it was this thesis that Cheney
and company nailed to the door on their way out.

The new administration tacitly rejected the heavy-handed, unilateral approach to
U.S. primacy favored by Powell, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. Taking office in the
relative calm of the early post ­ Cold War era, Clinton sought to maximize
America's existing position of strength and promote its interests through
economic diplomacy, multilateral institutions (dominated by the United States),
greater international free trade, and the development of allied coalitions,
including American-led collective military action. American policy, in short,
shifted from global dominance to globalism.

Clinton also failed to prosecute military campaigns with sufficient vigor to
satisfy the defense strategists of the previous administration. Wolfowitz found
Clinton's Iraq policy especially infuriating. During the Gulf War, Wolfowitz
harshly criticized the decision ­ endorsed by Powell and Cheney ­ to end the war
once the U.N. mandate of driving Saddam's forces from Kuwait had been fulfilled,
leaving the Iraqi dictator in office. He called on the Clinton Administration to
finish the job by arming Iraqi opposition forces and sending U.S. ground troops
to defense a base of operation for them in the southern region of the country.
In a 1996 editorial, Wolfowitz raised the prospect of launching a preemptive
attack against Iraq. "Should we sit idly by," he wrote, "with our passive
containment policy and our inept cover operations, and wait until a tyrant
possessing large quantities of weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated
delivery systems strikes out at us?" Wolfowitz suggested it was "necessary" to
"go beyond the containment strategy."

Wolfowitz's objections to Clinton's military tactics were not limited to Iraq.
Wolfowitz had endorsed President Bush's decision in late 1992 to intervene in
Somalia on a limited humanitarian basis. Clinton later expanded the mission into
a broader peacekeeping effort, a move that ended in disaster. With perfect
twenty-twenty hindsight, Wolfowitz decried Clinton's decision to send U.S.
troops into combat "where there is no significant U.S. national interest." He
took a similar stance on Clinton's ill-fated democracy-building effort in Haiti,
chastising the president for engaging "American military prestige" on an issue"
of the little or no importance" to U.S. interests. Bosnia presented a more
complicated mix of posturing and ideologics. While running for president,
Clinton had scolded the Bush Administration for failing to take action to stem
the flow of blood in the Balkans. Once in office, however, and chastened by
their early misadventures in Somalia and Haiti, Clinton and his advisers
struggled to articulate a coherent Bosnia policy. Wolfowitz complained in 1994
of the administration's failure to "develop an effective course of action.' He
personally advocated arming the Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the
Serbs. Powell, on the other hand, publicly cautioned against intervention. In
1995 a U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign, combined with a Croat-Muslim ground
offensive, forced the Serbs into negotiations, leading to the Dayton Peace
Accords. In 1999, as Clinton rounded up support for joint U.S.-NATO action in
Kosovo, Wolfowitz hectored the president for failing to act quickly enough.
After eight years of what Cheney et al. regarded as wrong-headed military
adventures and pinprick retaliatory strikes, the Clinton Administration ­
mercifully, in their view ­ came to an end. With the ascension of George W. Bush
to the presidency, the authors of the Plan returned to government, ready to pick
up where they had left off. Cheney of course, became vice president, Powell
became secretary of state, and Wolfowitz moved into the number two slot at the
Pentagon, as Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. Other contributors also returned: Two
prominent members of the Wolfowitz team that crafted the original DPG took up
posts on Cheney's staff. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who served as Wolfowitz's
deputy during Bush I, became the vice president's chief of staff and national
security adviser. And Eric Edelman, an assistant deputy undersecretary of
defense in the first Bush Administration, became a top foreign policy adviser to
Cheney.

Cheney and company had not changed their minds during the Clinton interlude
about the correct course for U.S. policy, but they did not initially appear bent
on resurrecting the Plan. Rather than present a unified vision of foreign policy
to the world, in the early going the administration focused on promoting a
series of seemingly unrelated initiatives. Notable among these were missile
defense and space-based weaponry, long-standing conservative causes. In
addition, a distinct tone of unilateralism emerged as the new administration
announced its intent to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in
order to pursue missile defense; its opposition to U.S. ratification of an
international nuclear-test-ban pact; and its refusal to become a party to an
International Criminal Court. It also raised the prospect of ending the
self-imposed U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing initiated by the President's
father during the 1992 presidential campaign. Moreover, the administration
adopted a much tougher diplomatic posture, as evidenced, most notably, by a
distinct hardening of relations with both China and North Korea. While none of
this was inconsistent with the concept of U.S. dominance, these early actions
did not, at the time, seem to add up to a coherent strategy.

It was only after September 11 that the Plan emerged in full. Within days of the
attacks, Wolfowitz and Libby began calling for unilateral military action
against Iraq, on the shaky premise that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network could
not have pulled off the assaults without Saddam Hussein's assistance. At the
time, Bush rejected such appeals, but Wolfowitz kept pushing and the President
soon came around. In his State of the Union address in January, Bush labeled
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an "axis of evil," and warned that he would "not
wait on events" to prevent them from using weapons of mass destruction against
the United States. He reiterated his commitment to preemption in his West Point
speech in June. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited
too long," he said. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and
confront the worst threats before they emerge." Although it was less noted, Bush
in that same speech also reintroduced the Plan's central theme. He declared that
the United States would prevent the emergence of a rival power by maintaining
"military strengths beyond the challenge." With that, the President effectively
adopted a strategy his father's administration had developed ten years earlier
to ensure that the United States would remain the world's preeminent power.
While the headlines screamed "preemption," no one noticed the declaration of the
dominance strategy.

In case there was any doubt about the administration's intentions, the
Pentagon's new DPG lays them out. Signed by Wolfowitz's new boss, Donald
Rumsfeld, in May and leaked to the Los Angeles Times in July, it contains all
the key elements of the original Plan and adds several complementary features.
The preemptive strikes envisioned in the original draft DPG are now "unwarned
attacks." The old Powell-Cheney notion of military "forward presence" is now
"forwarded deterrence." The use of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy called
for in the Powell Doctrine is now labeled an "effects based" approach.
Some of the names have stayed the same. Missile defense is back, stronger than
ever, and the call goes up again for a shift from a "threat based" structure to
a "capabilities based" approach. The new DPG also emphasizes the need to replace
the so-called Cold War strategy of preparing to fight two major conflicts
simultaneously with what the Los Angeles Times refers to as "a more complex
approach aimed at dominating air and space on several fronts." This, despite the
fact that Powell had originally conceived ­ and the first Bush Administration
had adopted ­ the two-war strategy as a means of filling the "threat blank" left
by the end of the Cold War.

Rumsfeld's version adds a few new ideas, most impressively the concept of
preemptive strikes with nuclear weapons. These would be earth-penetrating
nuclear weapons used for attacking "hardened and deeply buried targets," such as
command-and-control bunkers, missile silos, and heavily fortified underground
facilities used to build and store weapons of mass destruction. The concept
emerged earlier this year when the administration's Nuclear Posture Review
leaked out. At the time, arms-control experts warned that adopting the NPR's
recommendations would undercut existing arms-control treaties, do serious harm
to nonproliferation efforts, set off new rounds of testing, and dramatically
increase the prospectus of nuclear weapons being used in combat. Despite these
concerns, the administration appears intent on developing the weapons. In a
final flourish, the DPG also directs the military to develop cyber-, laser-, and
electronic-warfare capabilities to ensure U.S. dominion over the heavens.
Rumsfeld spelled out these strategies in Foreign affairs earlier this year, and
it is there that he articulated the remaining elements of the Plan;
unilateralism and global dominance. Like the revised DPG of 1992, Rumsfeld
feigns interest in collective action but ultimately rejects it as impractical.

"Wars can benefit from coalitions," he writes, "but they should not be fought by
committee." And coalitions, he adds, "must not determine the mission." The
implication is the United States will determine the missions and lead the
fights. Finally, Rumsfeld expresses the key concept of the Plan: preventing the
emergence of rival powers. Like the original draft DPG of 1992, he states that
America's goal is to develop and maintain the military strength necessary to
"dissuade" rivals or adversaries from "competing." with no challengers, and a
proposed defense budget of $379 billion for next year, the United States would
reign over all its surveys.

Reaction to the latest edition of the Plan has, thus far, focused on preemption.
Commentators parrot the administration's line, portraying the concept of
preemptory strikes as a "new" strategy aimed at combating terrorism. In an op-ed
piece for the Washington Post following Bush's West Point address, former
Clinton adviser William Galston described preemption as part of a "brand-new
security doctrine," and warned of possible negative diplomatic consequences.
Others found the concept more appealing. Loren Thompson of the conservative
Lexington Institute hailed the "Bush Doctrine" as "a necessary response to the
new dangers that America faces" and declared it "the biggest shift in strategic
thinking in two generations." Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley echoed
that sentiment, writing that "no talk of this ilk has been heard from American
leaders since John Foster Dulles talked of rolling back the Iron Curtain."
Preemption, of course, is just part of the Plan, and the Plan is hardly new. It
is a warmed-over version of the strategy Cheney and his coauthors rolled out in
1992 as the answer to the end of the Cold War. Then the goal was global
dominance, and it met with bad reviews. Now it is the answer to terrorism. The
emphasis is on preemption, and the reviews are generally enthusiastic. Through
all of this, the dominance motif remains, though largely undetected.
This country once rejected "unwarned" attacks such as Pearl Harbor as barbarous
and unworthy of a civilized nation. Today many cheer the prospect of conducting
sneak attacks ­ potentially with nuclear weapons ­ on piddling powers run by
tin-pot despots.

We also once denounced those who tried to rule the world. Our primary objection
(at least officially) to the Soviet Union as its quest for global domination.
Through the successful employment of the tools of containment, deterrence,
collective security, and diplomacy ­ the very methods we now reject ­ we rid
ourselves and the world of the Evil Empire. Having done so, we now pursue the
very thing for which we opposed it. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, there
appears to be no one left to stop us.

Perhaps, however, there is. The Bush Administration and its loyal opposition
seem not to grasp that the quests for dominance generate backlash. Those
threatened with preemption may themselves launch preemptory strikes. And even
those who are successfully "preempted" or dominated may object and find means to
strike back. Pursuing such strategies may, paradoxically, result in greater
factionalism and rivalry, precisely the things we seek to end.

Not all Americans share Colin Powell's desire to be "the bully on the block." In
fact, some believe that by following a different path the United States has an
opportunity to establish a more lasting security environment. As Dartmouth
professors Stephen Brooks and William Woblforth wrote recently in Foreign
Affairs, "Unipolarity makes it possible to be the global bully ­ but it also
offers the United States the luxury of being able to look beyond its immediate
needs to its own, and the world's, long-term interests. ..... Magnanimity and
restraint in the face of temptation are tenets of successful statecraft that
have proved their worth." Perhaps, in short, we can achieve our desired ends by
means other than global domination.

Source: Congressional Record for October 10, 2002