Recent revelations about Iraq’s inventory of chemical and biological weapons, combined with what was already known about the nature of the Iraqi regime, stirred in prudent people thoughts retrospective and anticipatory. One thought was of the gratitude owed to the Israeli government that decided, and the pilots who enforced the decision, to destroy the Baghdad reactor that served Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. That occurred in 1981. The world would have a different look and feel today if the Iraq that invaded Kuwait (and menaced Saudi Arabia) in 1990 had possessed nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them.
President Clinton has said, “North Korea cannot be allowed to get nuclear weapons.” Secretary of State Christopher says of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, “Last fall, this administration ended it.” There really is no reason to believe that. However, those words represent the administration’s intention, which is to elevate the game “let’s pretend” to a policy.
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and of the means of delivering them, is driving the suddenly quickened debate about developing ballistic missile defenses for America. Many Americans do not know that the nation has no such defenses and is effectively precluded from deploying even such defenses as could defeat an attack by a few missiles from a rogue state. That is because of a 23-year-old treaty with a nation that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. When focus groups of voters are asked what a president should do if notified that a missile is incoming, the voters say: Shoot it down, of course. When they are told that the nation does not have the capacity to do that, and why it does not, they often are incredulous and indignant. This issue, which Republicans in Congress will highlight with increased funds and strong language in defense appropriation and authorization bills, is ripe for inclusion in the presidential campaign.
Today the nation’s attention, or that minuscule portion of it that is allotted to foreign policy, is on events triggered by one Bosnia Serb mortar shell. That shell killed 37 people in a Sarajevo marketplace and could have killed the most successful military alliance in history. If NATO had again dithered and allowed U.N. bureaucrats to keep it bridled and snaffled, an American majority might have begun to ask insistently some awkward questions, such as: Why is the nation bearing the burden of European engagement when such engagement is only depressing and embarrassing? And why, for that matter, does the nation bother to have a 12-digit defense budget if it still cannot dissuadea tin pot army like the Bosnian Serbs from random terror and systematic war crimes? When, years late, NATO at last used force against the Serbs, it demonstrated how the personnel and materiel purchased by defense budgets can rescue diplomacy from impotence. And if, as seems likely, the final settlement accepts much of what Serbian aggression accomplished on the ground, that will merely demonstrate that diplomacy rarely can entirely reverse what force has established.
The mortar shell forced many Americans to explore the limits of their tolerance of horrors that affect them primarily by disturbing them. The shell caused many Americans to contemplate what might be the consequences-barbarism and anarchy, for starters–of a thorough abandonment of the quest for (in Sir Michael Howard’s words) “a world impregnated by American ideals and controlled by American power.” Of course, no one really believes the “world” can be “controlled” by American power. However, 41 months of carnage in the Balkans have demonstrated that without American power, and American leadership that is unembarrassed by that power, the phrase “the West” is no longer a political expression denoting anything coherent or consequential. Caleb Carr, editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, rightly says, “We are, today, farther from a viable international order than we were 50 or even 10 years ago, if only because there are fewer sound, powerful nations to support one.” With a confident United States leading, there are a few such nations. Without such a United States, there are none.
To see the need for visible American power, look to the Far East, where America went to war three times in 25 years. There China, a regime in crisis, is trying to use naked intimidation to control, if not eliminate, Taiwan’s freedom of movement on the international stage. The disruption of air and sea traffic by missile tests conducted provocatively near Taiwan was a notably crude attempt to deter Taiwan from trying to raise its international profile, as it did with its President’s visit to Cornell University in May. The CIA says China is involved in territorial or maritime disputes with Russia, India, North Korea, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. The influence of China’s military, which includes the world’s largest army and a rapidly growing blue-water Navy, may wax during the coming post-Deng succession crisis. Merrick Carey of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and Loren Thompson of Georgetown University report in Sea Power magazine that “Chinese military publications routinely assert that nearly 2 million square miles of land in adjacent countries rightfully belongs to China.” And China regards the South China Sea, through which much international military and commercial shipping passes, as Chinese water.
In our children’s lifetimes, and perhaps in ours, China (or some large fragment thereof; China, too, could succumb to the centrifugal forces at work in the world) is apt to possess a superpower’s arsenal of ICBMs equipped with nuclear weapons. Yes, our children’s lifetimes.
