What does this mean in practical terms? We should start with the premise that the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack. As such, our campaign to take out Al Qaeda base camps and the Taliban regime that harbored them was entirely justified — and was viewed as legitimate even in most Islamic countries. It may be preferable to have the support of our allies in such military campaigns, but our immediate safety can’t be held hostage to the desire for international consensus; if we have to go it alone, then the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country.
I would also argue that we have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security — so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group, or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies with which the United States has mutual defense agreements), and has or will have the means to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this standard, and we can and should carry out preemptive strikes against them wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not meet this standard, which is why our invasion was such a strategic blunder. If we are going to act unilaterally, then we had better have the goods on our targets.
Once we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world. By this, I do not mean that the UN Security Council — a body that in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold War — era time warp — should have a veto over our actions. Nor do I mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and then do what we please. Acting multilaterally means doing what George H. W. Bush and his team did in the first Gulf War — engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions, and making sure our actions serve to further recognize international norms.
Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do from the observance of international “rules of the road.” We can’t win converts to those rules if we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.
Obtaining global buy-in also allows the United States to carry a lighter load when military action is required and enhances the chances for success. Given the comparatively modest defense budgets of most of our allies, sharing the military burden may in some cases prove a bit of an illusion, but in the Balkans and Afghanistan, our NATO partners have indeed shouldered their share of the risks and costs. Additionally, for the types of conflicts in which we’re most likely to find ourselves engaged, the initial military operation will often be less complex and costly than the work that follows — training local police forces, restoring electricity and water services, building a working judicial system, fostering an independent media, setting up a public health infrastructure, and planning elections. Allies can help pay the freight and provide expertise for these critical efforts, as they have in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but they are far more likely to do so if our actions have gained international support on the front end. In military parlance, legitimacy is a “force multiplier.”
Just as important, the painstaking process of building coalitions forces us to listen to other points of view and therefore look before we leap. When we’re not defending ourselves against a direct and imminent threat, we will often have the benefit of time; our military power becomes just one tool among many (albeit an extraordinarily important one) to influence events and advance our interests in the world — interests in maintaining access to key energy sources, keeping financial markets stable, seeing international boundaries respected, and preventing genocide. In pursuit of those interests, we should be engaging in some hardheaded analysis of the costs and benefits of the use of force compared to the other tools of influence at our disposal.
Is cheap oil worth the costs — in blood and treasure — of war? Will our military intervention in a particular ethnic dispute lead to a permanent political settlement or an indefinite commitment of U.S. forces? Can our dispute with a country be settled diplomatically or through a coordinated series of sanctions? If we hope to win the broader battle of ideas, then world opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it may be frustrating at times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that enjoy the blanket of our protection, or to hear speeches in the UN General Assembly designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse inaction, it’s just possible that beneath all the rhetoric are perspectives that can illuminate the situation and help us make better strategic decisions.
Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the difficult, methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting the terrorists’ capacity to inflict harm. That work includes shutting down terrorist financial networks and sharing intelligence to hunt down terrorist suspects and infiltrate their cells; our continued failure to effectively coordinate intelligence gathering even among various U.S. agencies, as well as our continued lack of effective human intelligence capacity, is inexcusable. Most important, we need to join forces to keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands.
One of the best examples of such collaboration was pioneered in the nineties by Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, two men who understood the need to nurture coalitions before crises strike, and who applied this knowledge to the critical problem of nuclear proliferation. The premise of what came to be known as the Nunn-Lugar program was simple: After the fall of the Soviet Union, the biggest threat to the United States — aside from an accidental launch — wasn’t a first strike ordered by Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but the migration of nuclear material or know-how into the hands of terrorists and rogue states, a possible result of Russia’s economic tailspin, corruption in the military, the impoverishment of Russian scientists, and security and control systems that had fallen into disrepair. Under Nunn-Lugar, America basically provided the resources to fix up those systems, and although the program caused some consternation to those accustomed to Cold War thinking, it has proven to be one of the most important investments we could have made to protect ourselves from catastrophe.
In August 2005, I traveled with Senator Lugar to see some of this handiwork. It was my first trip to Russia and Ukraine, and I couldn’t have had a better guide than Dick, a remarkably fit seventy-three-year-old with a gentle, imperturbable manner and an inscrutable smile that served him well during the often interminable meetings we held with foreign officials. Together we visited the nuclear facilities of Saratov, where Russian generals pointed with pride to the new fencing and security systems that had been recently completed; afterward, they served us a lunch of borscht, vodka, potato stew, and a deeply troubling fish Jell-O mold. In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25 tactical missiles were being dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high empty missile casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles that were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.