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arcana imperii --from Tacitus, the hidden motives and means of empire
With the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy community has been avid to try something new. Having spent decades evaluating the drab minutiae of arms control and in other ways attempting to manage the seemingly eternal US-Soviet rivalry, the Pentagon and the State Department, the foundations, the think tanks and the luminaries of the foreign policy elite have eagerly answered the call to refashion America's national security strategy. The flood of recent reports, articles and books that they have produced, however, is disappointing. After promising bold new thinking on America's grand strategy, these writings boldly call for the status quo. Some take a nip here: the US can reduce its troop strength in Europe to 100,000 ("although not below that"). Others take a tuck there: "not all states are equally important to the United States" (although it would be "a mistake to ignore the spillover effects" of instability "on international order and on American interests"). In short, when these alterations are finished, the essentials of America's "Cold War" strategy remain inviolate.
The "bottom up review" of US defense policy, released by the Clinton Administration in September 1993, is the most recent illustration of this stasis. Having promised a fundamental reassessment of America's national security requirements, Pentagon planners concluded after six months of analysis that US security demands military spending of over $1.3 trillion over the next five years and the permanent commitment of at least 200,000 US troops in Europe and East Asia--in other words, a strategy remarkably similar to that which America pursued during the Cold War. Moreover, rather than relinquish America's costly and risky responsibilities by dissolving Cold War alliances, the Administration now plans to expand NATO's responsibilities eastward. Those who call for a more modest US defense policy argue that American defense plans seem like extravagance born of paranoia or of a defense establishment's anxiety to protect its budget. In fact, however, given the way the United States has defined its interests since the Second World War, these plans are quite prudent. And that is the problem.
The demand for new strategies for a new world springs from the assumption that the Soviet "threat" fundamentally determined US diplomacy...