Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

I. Overview of America's International Strategy

Our Nation's cause has always been larger than our Nation's defense.

—President Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

—Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto

From President Bush's opening lines of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS), the gap between rhetoric and reality takes on Browningesque proportions: "‘Our Nation's cause has always been larger than our Nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors liberty. We will defend the peace against the threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent'" (1).

Regardless of authorial (or good) intentions, the NSS reads more like late—very late—nineteenth-century poetry than a strategic doctrine for the twenty-first century. The rhetoric of the White House favors and clearly intends to mobilize the moral clarity, nostalgic sentimentality, and uncontested dominance reminiscent of the last great empires against the ambiguities, complexities, and messiness of the current world disorder. However, the gulf between the nation's stated cause ("to help make the world not just safer but better" [1]) and defensive needs (to fight "a war against terrorists of global reach" [5]) is so vast that one detects what Nietzsche referred to as the "breath of empty space," that void between the world as it is and as we would wish it to be, which produces all kinds of metaphysical concoctions.

In short shrift (thirty pages), the White House articulation of U.S. global objectives to the Congress elevates strategic discourse from a traditional, temporal calculation of means and ends, to the theological realm of monotheistic faith and monolithic truth. Relying more on aspiration than analysis, revelation than reason, the NSS is not grand but grandiose strategy. In pursuit of an impossible state of national security against terrorist evil, soldiers will need to be sacrificed, civil liberties curtailed, civilians collaterally damaged, regimes destroyed. But a nation's imperial overreach should exceed its fiduciary grasp: what's a full-spectrum dominance of the battle space for?

Were this not an official White House doctrine, the contradictions of the NSS could be interpreted only as poetic irony. How else to comprehend the opening paragraph, which begins with "The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world" and ends with "The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom" (1)? Perhaps the cabalistic Straussians that make up the defense intellectual brain trust of the Bush administration (among them, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol) have come up with a nuanced, indeed, anti-Machiavellian reading of Machiavelli that escapes the uninitiated. But so fixed is the NSS on the creation of a world in America's image that concepts such as balance of power and imminent threat, once rooted in historical, juridical, as well as reciprocal traditions, become free-floating signifiers. Few Europeans, "old" or "new," would recognize the balance of power principle deployed by the NSS to justify preemptive, unilateral, military action against not actual but "emerging" imminent threats (15). Defined by the eighteenth-century jurist Emerich de Vattel as a state of affairs in which no one preponderant power can lay down the law to others, the classical sense of balance of power is effectively inverted in principle by the NSS document and in practice by the go-it-alone statecraft of the United States. Balance of power is global suzerainty, and war is peace.

II. Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of...