Brad DeLong on 9/11
Brad DeLong, an economist for the Clinton Administration, has this article about how Clintonites thought about American grand strategy prior to 9/11. Granted, he’s not from State or Defense, but it’s an interesting perspective.
Basically, the Administration thought:
Let’s do whatever we can at all costs to avoid the emergence of a Weimar Russia, or a National Socialist China. Let’s do whatever we can to maximize the rate of economic growth in the developing world, for it was the Great Depression that gave Hitler his chance in Germany and the militarist-fascists their chance in Japan. Let’s hope that in fifty years the process of industrialization in the emerging great powers of the developing world–Russia, Brazil, China, and India–will be completed, and it will be as unthinkable that one of them will embark on a fascist-nationalist campaign of conquest against its neighbors as a death struggle between France and Italy, or America and Canada, is unthinkable today. Let’s push for as much democratization as possible as fast as possible, not because democracies are never aggressive–consider France on the eve of World War I–but because your odds that societal goals will be peaceful are greater if they well up from the people than if they are imposed by a dictator.
So, the United States embarked on a campaign to increase world peace through trade, technology and law. Perhaps naive, but, as DeLong notes, the alternative of keeping, say, the Chinese as poor as possible would only result in “an aggressive, expansionist China with National Socialist characteristics.” And this strategy has been successful. A Weimar Russia would have been far worse than Al Qaeda.
The fundamental flaw of this strategy was that everyone forgot about religion, “forgot about the dangerously explosive interaction between (i) rapidly-rising literacy rates found in an urban middle class, and (ii) a religion based on a Holy Book that few in previous generations could read.” The wars of the Reformation are the analogy with Islam possibly going through its own Reformation. And the Reformation took four generations to burn out, before people “learned that reading ones private copy of the Holy Book did not make one the vessel of the will of God, and that waging Holy War was not a way to save the souls of others, but a way to lose ones own.”
So, what are we to do, now that we’re confronted with these cults of death? DeLong fundamentally proposes what the Clinton Administration had been doing, but more so: instead of writing simple trade treaties, we must engage in enfrancishing the disenfranchised of the world, so that more people will have a stake in this world.
When governments cannot provide the very basics–law and order, education, hospitals, famine relief, the promise of a job, the promise of a standard of living better than ones parents saw–false prophets who promise a Puritan paradise and the imminent arrival of the reign of God have an easy time finding followers for their message. Nation-building cannot be something we “don’t do.” Nation-building and economy-building must be something that we “do do”–at the very heart of the long-run enterprise.
The flaw, I think, is still there. Nation building should be a fundamental part of our grand strategy — Iraq should be built as an example of liberal ideals, though it may take decades — but the lure of the material world may not attract the fanatic from his apocalyptic goals. As has been observed many times, the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were drawn from the middle class, from Saudi Arabia, not Somalia. Material enfranchisement into the stable world may not help reduce the number of possible foot soldiers who may be recruited into the cults of death, and the leaders of the cults won’t be seduced by the material. The material is in fact one of the things they’re rebelling against.
I’m reminded of this seminar exercise we had in one of the core political theory classes at SIPA a lifetime ago. I don’t recall what the theory topic was, but the exercise was to follow through on the Oslo Accords, since they had recently been signed. The seminar divided into Israeli, Palestinian and American groups; we were to negotiate a final settlement, which we did within half an hour and without friction. Clearly, this was wrong, but our secular liberalism, finely honed by our journey to graduate school, couldn’t quite understand why. We clearly couldn’t incorporate the totality of religious death cults into our world view, at least for this seminar exercise, at least until we had to confront it after 9/11.