NUCLEAR DISORDER by Graham Allison | Foreign Affairs
The global nuclear order today could be as fragile as the global financial order was two years ago, when conventional wisdom declared it to be sound, stable, and resilient. In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a confrontation that he thought had one chance in three of ending in nuclear war, U.S. President John F. Kennedy concluded that the nuclear order of the time posed unacceptable risks to mankind. "I see the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons," he forecast. "I regard that as the greatest possible danger." Kennedy's estimate reflected the general expectation that as nations acquired the advanced technological capability to build nuclear weapons, they would do so. Although history did not proceed along that trajectory, Kennedy's warning helped awaken the world to the intolerable dangers of unconstrained nuclear proliferation.
His conviction spurred a surge of diplomatic initiatives: a hot line between Washington and Moscow, a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, a ban on nuclear weapons in outer space. Refusing to accept the future Kennedy had spotlighted, the international community instead negotiated various international constraints, the centerpiece of which was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Thanks to the nonproliferation regime, 184 nations, including more than 40 that have the technical ability to build nuclear arsenals, have renounced nuclear weapons. Four decades since the NPT was signed, there are only nine nuclear states. Moreover, for more than 60 years, no nuclear weapon has been used in an attack.
In 2004, the secretary-general of the UN created a panel to review future threats to international peace and security. It identified nuclear Armageddon as the prime threat, warning, "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the nonproliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation." Developments since 2004 have only magnified the risks of an irreversible cascade.
The current global nuclear order is extremely fragile, and the three most urgent challenges to it are North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. If North Korea and Iran become established nuclear weapons states over the next several years, the nonproliferation regime will have been hollowed out. If Pakistan were to lose control of even one nuclear weapon that was ultimately used by terrorists, that would change the world. It would transform life in cities, shrink what are now regarded as essential civil liberties, and alter conceptions of a viable nuclear order.
Over the past eight years, the Pakistani government has tripled its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Henry Kissinger has noted that the defining challenge for statesmen is to recognize "a change in the international environment so likely to undermine a nation's security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or how ostensibly legitimate it appears." The collapse of the existing nuclear order would constitute just such a change -- and the consequences would make nuclear terrorism and nuclear war so imminent that prudent statesmen must do everything feasible to prevent it.
THE NUCLEAR CASCADE
Seven story lines are advancing along crooked paths, each undermining the existing nuclear order. These comprise North Korea's expanding nuclear weapons program, Iran's continuing nuclear ambitions, Pakistan's increasing instability, al Qaeda's enduring remnant, growing cynicism about the nonproliferation regime, nuclear energy's renaissance, and the recent learning of new lessons about the utility of nuclear weapons in international affairs.
Most of the foreign policy community has still not absorbed the facts about North Korean developments over the past eight years. One of the poorest and most isolated states on earth, North Korea had at most two bombs' worth of plutonium in 2001. Today, it has an arsenal of ten bombs and has conducted two nuclear weapons tests. It is currently harvesting the plutonium for an 11th bomb and restoring its reactor in Yongbyon, which has the capacity to produce a further two bombs' worth of plutonium a year. In addition, Pyongyang has repeatedly tested long-range missiles that are increasingly reliable, has proliferated nuclear technology (including the sale of a Yongbyon-style reactor to Syria), and may be developing a second path to nuclear weapons by building a facility to enrich uranium.
From the perspective of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, two questions jump off the page. First, does Kim Jong Il imagine that he could get away with selling a nuclear weapon to Osama bin Laden or Iran? The fact that he sold Syria a plutonium-producing reactor suggests that he does. Second, what are the consequences for the NPT if one of the world's weakest states can violate the rules of the regime with impunity and defy the demands of the strongest states, which are those that are charged with its enforcement?
Already, North Korea's nuclear advances have triggered reflections in Seoul, Tokyo, and other regional capitals about options that were previously considered taboo. Although Japan's political culture is unambiguously against nuclear weapons, in 2002 then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi demonstrated how quickly that could change when he observed publicly, "It is significant that although we could have them, we don't." And because Japan has a ready stockpile of nearly 2,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and a well-developed missile program (for launching satellites), if Tokyo were to conclude that it required a credible nuclear deterrent of its own, it could adopt a serious nuclear weapons posture virtually overnight.
Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear odyssey is a moving target. Developments in the current negotiations may offer glimmers of hope. But it is unlikely that Iran will prove less obstinate and devious than North Korea has been. All the evidence suggests that Iran is methodically building up a widely dispersed array of mining, uranium-conversion, and uranium-enrichment facilities that could provide the infrastructure for nuclear weapons. At this point, it has mastered the technologies to indigenously manufacture, build, and operate its own centrifuges. Already, Iran is spinning 4,500 centrifuges, which produce an average of six pounds of low-enriched uranium per day, and has installed an additional 3,700 centrifuges that are ready to begin operation. The country now has a stockpile of over 3,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium -- enough, after further enrichment, to make two Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. Moreover, as the outing of a previously secret enrichment facility at Qom makes evident, Iran has thought carefully about the threat of a military strike on its declared facility at Natanz. To hedge against that risk, it has likely constructed more than one covert enrichment plant -- facilities that would also provide a potential sneak-out option.
If Iran conducts a nuclear weapons test sometime in the next several years, it is probable that over the decade that follows, it will not be the only new nuclear weapons state in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, for example, has insisted that it will not accept a future in which Iran -- its Shiite, Persian rival -- has nuclear weapons and it does not. Given the technical prerequisites, Saudi Arabia would much more likely be a buyer than a maker. Indeed, some in the U.S. intelligence community suspect that there have already been conversations between Saudi and Pakistani national security officials about the sale or transfer of an "Islamic bomb." In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia secretly purchased from China 36 CSS-2 missiles, which have a range of 1,500 miles and no plausible military use other than to carry nuclear warheads.
Egypt and Turkey could also follow in Iran's nuclear footsteps. As former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2009, "We're on the cusp of an explosion of proliferation, and Iran is now the poster child. If Iran is allowed to go forward, in self-defense or for a variety of reasons, we could have half a dozen countries in the region and 20 or 30 more around the world doing the same thing just in case."
THE NUCLEAR TERRORIST
Obama’s mission is to bend the trend lines currently pointing toward catastrophe.
As Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has noted, nuclear terrorism is "the most serious danger the world is facing." In 2007, the U.S. Congress established the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. The commission, of which I am a member, issued its report to Congress and the new administration in December 2008. It included two provocative judgments: first, that if the world continued on its current trajectory, the odds of a successful nuclear or biological terrorist attack somewhere in the world in the next five years were greater than even, and second, "Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan."
Over the past eight years, as its stability and authority have become increasingly uncertain, the Pakistani government has tripled its arsenal of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons material. During this same period, the leadership of al Qaeda has moved from Afghanistan to ungoverned areas inside the Pakistani border, the Taliban have become a much more effective insurgent force within Pakistan, and the military leader who ruled Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has been replaced by a fragile, fledging, splintered democracy.
Pakistan's military has grown increasingly reliant on its nuclear arsenal to deter India's overwhelming superiority in conventional arms. This strategy requires the dispersal of nuclear weapons (to prevent Indian preemption) and, especially in crises, looser command and control. In 2002, India and Pakistan went to the brink of war -- a war that both governments thought might go nuclear. After Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists with links to Pakistani intelligence services killed 173 people in a dramatic attack in Mumbai in November 2008, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh displayed exquisite restraint. But he has warned unambiguously that the next major terrorist attack supported or sponsored by Pakistan will trigger a sharp military response.
In October 2009, Taliban extremists wearing Pakistani army uniforms occupied the government's military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Had they instead penetrated a nuclear weapons storage facility, they could have stolen the fissile core of a nuclear bomb. More troubling is the question of what would happen to Pakistan's estimated 100 nuclear bombs, and even larger amount of nuclear material, if the government itself were to fall. When asked about this, U.S. officials suggest that Pakistan's arsenal is secure: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently stated, "I'm quite comfortable that the security arrangements for the Pakistani nuclear capabilities are sufficient and adequate." History offers a compelling counter to these claims. In 2004, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan, was arrested for selling nuclear weapons technology and even bomb designs to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Khan created what the head of the IAEA called the "Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation." Khan was enabled by an extended period of instability in Pakistan. Could uncertainty and instability in Pakistan today provide similarly propitious opportunities for mini-Khans to proliferate nuclear technology?
That al Qaeda has been significantly weakened by the U.S. military's focused Predator and Special Forces attacks on its leadership in the ungoverned regions of Pakistan is good news. The bad news is that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain alive, active, and desperate. On 9/11, al Qaeda demonstrated the capacity to organize and execute a large-scale terrorist attack more operationally challenging than detonating a nuclear weapon. As the 9/11 Commission documented, al Qaeda has been seriously seeking nuclear weapons since the early 1990s. The commission's report provides evidence about two Pakistani scientists who met with bin Laden and Zawahiri in Afghanistan to discuss nuclear weapons. These scientists were founding members of Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, which is ostensibly a charitable agency that was created to support projects in Afghanistan. But the foundation's board included a fellow scientist knowledgeable about nuclear weapons construction, two Pakistani air force generals, one Pakistani army general, and an industrialist who owned Pakistan's largest foundry.
Bin Laden has called the acquisition of nuclear weapons al Qaeda's "religious duty" and has announced the movement's aspiration to "kill four million Americans." As former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir, "The most senior leaders of al Qa'ida are still singularly focused on acquiring WMD [weapons of mass destruction]." "The main threat," he argued, "is the nuclear one. I am convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives desperately want to go." As the noose tightens around al Qaeda's neck, its motivation to mount a spectacular attack to demonstrate its prowess and rally its supporters grows. Bin Laden has challenged his followers to "trump 9/11." Nothing could realize that aspiration so successfully as a mushroom cloud over a U.S. city.
REGIME FATIGUE
Growing cynicism about the nonproliferation regime also threatens to undercut the global nuclear order. It is easy to see why non-nuclear-weapons states view the regime as an instrument for the haves to deny the have-nots. At the NPT Review Conference in 2000, the United States and other nuclear weapons states promised to take 13 "practical steps" toward meeting their NPT commitments, but later, at the Review Conference in 2005, John Bolton, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, declared those 2000 undertakings inoperable and subsequently banned any use of the word "disarmament" from the "outcome document" of the UN's 60th anniversary summit. In preparation for the 2010 Review Conference, which will convene in May, diplomats at the IAEA have been joined by prime ministers and presidents in displaying considerable suspicion about a regime that permits nuclear weapons states to keep their arsenals but prevents others from joining the nuclear club. Those suspicions are reflected in governments' unwillingness to accept additional constraints that would reduce the risks of proliferation, such as by ratifying the enhanced safeguards agreement known as the Additional Protocol or approving an IAEA-managed multinational fuel bank to ensure states access to fuel for nuclear energy plants.
At the same time, rising concerns about greenhouse gas emissions have stimulated a growing demand for nuclear energy as a clean-energy alternative. There are currently 50 nuclear energy plants under construction, most of them in China and India, and 130 more might soon be built globally. Concern arises not from the nuclear reactors themselves but from the facilities that produce nuclear fuel and dispose of its waste product.
The hardest part of making nuclear weapons is producing fissile material: enriched uranium or plutonium. The same setup of centrifuges that enriches uranium ore to four percent to make fuel for nuclear power plants can enrich uranium to 90 percent for nuclear bombs. A nuclear regime that allows any state with a nuclear energy plant to build and operate its own enrichment facility invites proliferation. The thorny question is how to honor the right of non-nuclear-weapons states, granted by the NPT, to the "benefits of peaceful nuclear technology" without such a consequence. The answer is to provide an IAEA-governed international fuel bank that would guarantee a supply of nuclear fuel for states that would agree not to pursue enrichment and reprocessing activities. But persuading countries to forgo something others have for the greater good remains a stumbling block.
THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STATES
Finally, recent lessons about the utility of nuclear weapons in international affairs have also eroded the global nuclear order. U.S. President Barack Obama has endorsed President Ronald Reagan's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and has enlisted the endorsement of many other leaders, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Most realists in the international security community, however, regard such thinking as a hazy, long-term, and probably unachievable aspiration.
In the meantime, France is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, which President Nicolas Sarkozy has called "the nation's life insurance policy." China continues the modernization and expansion of its limited nuclear arsenal. With the collapse of its conventional forces, Russia has renewed its reliance on nuclear weapons. In the United States, the release of this year's Nuclear Posture Review, these reviews being a process meant to assess whether the U.S. nuclear arsenal is "reliable," will spark debates about whether the United States is building a stealth version of the earlier proposed "reliable replacement warhead."
Even more important than proposals for future programs are lessons learned from recent actions. The George W. Bush administration designated Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as "an axis of evil" and then proceeded to attack the one state that demonstrably had no nuclear weapons and give a pass to the state that had two bombs' worth of plutonium. The British strategist Lawrence Freedman summarized the lessons drawn by national security analysts around the world this way: "The only apparently credible way to deter the armed force of the US is to own your own nuclear arsenal." Many Iranians, and even a few Iraqis, have wondered whether the United States would have invaded Iraq in 2003 had Iraq been armed with a nuclear arsenal as large as North Korea's current one.
THE GEORGE MARSHALL QUESTION
After listening to a compelling briefing for a proposal or even in summarizing an argument presented by himself, Secretary of State George Marshall was known to pause and ask, "But how could we be wrong?" In that spirit, it is important to examine the reasons why the nonproliferation regime might actually be more robust than it appears.
Start with the bottom line. There are no more nuclear weapons states now than there were at the end of the Cold War. Since then, one undeclared and largely unrecognized nuclear weapons state, South Africa, eliminated its arsenal, and one new state, North Korea, emerged as the sole self-declared but unrecognized nuclear weapons state.
One hundred and eighty-four nations have forsworn the acquisition of nuclear weapons and signed the NPT. At least 13 countries began down the path to developing nuclear weapons with serious intent, and were technologically capable of completing the journey, but stopped short of the finish line: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia. Four countries had nuclear weapons but eliminated them: South Africa completed six nuclear weapons in the 1980s and then, prior to the transfer of power to the postapartheid government, dismantled them. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine together inherited more than 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. As a result of negotiated agreements among Russia, the United States, and each of these states, all of these weapons were returned to Russia for dismantlement. Ukraine's 1,640 strategic nuclear warheads were dismantled, and the highly enriched uranium was blended down to produce low-enriched uranium, which was sold to the United States to fuel its nuclear power plants. Few Americans are aware that, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts Program, half of all the electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the United States over the past decade has been fueled by enriched uranium blended down from the cores of nuclear warheads originally designed to destroy American cities.
Although they do not minimize the consequences of North Korea's or Iran's becoming a nuclear weapons state, those confident in the stability of the nuclear order are dubious about the prospects of a cascade of proliferation occurring in Asia, the Middle East, or elsewhere. In Japan, nuclear neuralgia has deep roots. The Japanese people suffered the consequences of the only two nuclear weapons ever exploded in war. Despite their differences, successive Japanese governments have remained confident in the U.S. nuclear umbrella and in the cornerstone of the United States' national security strategy in Asia, the U.S.-Japanese security alliance. The South Koreans fear a nuclear-armed North Korea, but they are even more fearful of life without the U.S. nuclear umbrella and U.S. troops on the peninsula. Taiwan is so penetrated and seduced by China that the terror of getting caught cheating makes it a poor candidate to go nuclear. And although rumors of the purchase by Myanmar (also called Burma) of a Yongbyon-style nuclear reactor from North Korea cannot be ignored, questions have arisen about whether the country would be able to successfully operate it.
In the Middle East, it is important to separate abstract aspirations from realistic plans. Few countries in the region have the scientific and technical infrastructure to support a nuclear weapons program. Saudi Arabia is a plausible buyer, although the United States would certainly make a vigorous effort to persuade it that it would be more secure under a U.S. nuclear umbrella than with its own arsenal. Egypt's determination to acquire nuclear weapons, meanwhile, is limited by its weak scientific and technical infrastructure, unless it were able to rent foreign expertise. And a Turkish nuclear bomb would not only jeopardize Turkey's role in NATO but also undercut whatever chances the country has for acceding to the EU.
Looking elsewhere, Brazil is now operating an enrichment facility but has signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which outlaws nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, and has accepted robust legal constraints, including those of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials. Other than South Africa, which retains the stockpile of 30 bombs' worth of highly enriched uranium that was once part of its nuclear program, it is difficult to identify other countries that might realistically become nuclear weapons states in the foreseeable future.
Such arguments for skepticism have a certain plausibility. The burden of evidence and analysis, however, supports the view that current trends pose unacceptable risks. As the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, which was led by former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James Schlesinger, concluded in 2009, "The risks of a proliferation 'tipping point' and of nuclear terrorism underscore the urgency of acting now."
THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW
Obama has put the danger of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism at the top of his national security agenda. He has called it "a threat that rises above all others in urgency" and warned that if the international community fails to act, "we will invite nuclear arms races in every region and the prospect of wars and acts of terror on a scale that we can hardly imagine." Consider the consequences, he continued, of an attack with even a single nuclear bomb: "Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life."
Obama's mission is to bend the trend lines currently pointing toward catastrophe. Most of the actions required to achieve this mission must be taken not by Washington but by other governments around the world, which will act on the basis of their own assessments of their interests. But in an effort to encourage them to act and to demonstrate U.S. leadership, Obama has pledged to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the United States' national security strategy, negotiate a follow-on arms control agreement with Russia to decrease U.S. and Russian nuclear armaments, ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, endeavor to ban the production of fissile material worldwide, and provide additional authority and resources to the IAEA. In the hope of rolling back North Korea's arsenal and stopping Iran short of building a nuclear bomb, he has opened negotiations with both countries, signaling a willingness to live with their regimes, however ugly, if they forgo nuclear weapons.
These steps mark the most substantial effort to revitalize the nuclear order since Kennedy. From his first major address abroad, when he spoke to the EU's 27 heads of state in Prague, to his chairmanship of the UN Security Council in September, Obama has been attempting to transform conceptions of the challenge.
This is an extraordinarily ambitious agenda -- easy to say, hard to do. And this important work will encounter serious obstacles and stubborn adversaries. As Obama noted at the UN, "The next 12 months could be pivotal in determining whether [the nonproliferation regime] will be strengthened or will slowly dissolve." Indeed, the year ahead is crowded with dates and events that will move this agenda forward or leave it floundering. Optimists can take heart from the much more positive attitudes toward the United States evident in capitals around the world recently. Skeptics, however, can point to the objective forces propelling dangers along, as well as the disconnect between the aspirations and the daily actions of the president and of the cabinet officers charged with realizing these goals.
The international community has crucial choices to make, and the stakes could not be higher. Having failed to heed repeated warning signs of rot in the U.S.-led global financial system, the world dare not wait for a catastrophic collapse of the nonproliferation regime. From the consequences of such an event, there is no feasible bailout.
What has changed is, most broadly, how we view the relationship between the dynamics within states and the distribution of power among them. As globalization strengthens some states, it exposes and exacerbates the failings of many others -- those too weak or poorly governed to address challenges within their borders and prevent them from spilling out and destabilizing the international order. In this strategic environment, it is vital to our national security that states be willing and able to meet the full range of their sovereign responsibilities, both beyond their borders and within them. This new reality has led us to some significant changes in our policy. We recognize that democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest. And in the broader Middle East, we recognize that freedom and democracy are the only ideas that can, over time, lead to just and lasting stability, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Israel made a determined effort to acquire nuclear weapons. However, just as fear of genocide is the key to understanding Israel's nuclear resolve, that fear has also encouraged nuclear restraint. After all, if Israel's enemies also acquired the bomb, the Jewish state might well face destruction, given its small size and high population density. Moreover, the specter of killing large numbers of innocent people, even to save their own, was morally unsettling for Israeli leaders.
This combination of resolve and restraint led to a code of nuclear conduct that is fundamentally different from that of all other nuclear weapons states. Israel neither affirms nor denies its possession of nuclear weapons; indeed, the government refuses to say anything factual about Israel's nuclear activities, and Israeli citizens are encouraged, both by law and by custom, to follow suit. And so they do, primarily through government censorship of and self-censorship by the media. This posture is known as nuclear opacity, or, in Hebrew, amimut.
The policy and practice of nuclear opacity was codified in 1969 in an extraordinary secret accord between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and U.S. President Richard Nixon. Although this agreement has never been openly acknowledged or documented, its existence was revealed in 1991 by the Israeli journalist Aluf Benn, and more information came out in some recently declassified memos regarding Nixon's 1969 meeting with Meir written by Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. According to the Nixon-Meir pact, as long as Israel did not advertise its possession of nuclear weapons by publicly declaring or testing them, the United States would tolerate and shield Israel's nuclear program.
Ever since, all U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers have reaffirmed this policy -- most recently, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 6, during which Obama stated, "We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it's in . . . Israel has unique security requirements. It's got to be able to respond to threats. . . . And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine [its] security interests."
International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory.
In Israel, for government officials, security analysts, and even the general public, nuclear opacity is one of the Jewish state's greatest strategic and diplomatic success stories. It has provided Israel with the best of all possible worlds: the advantages of nuclear deterrence to protect against existential threats but almost none of the potential political drawbacks of possessing nuclear weapons. If Israel went public about its bomb, it could face tangible costs. In particular, although the Arab states have learned to live, albeit uncomfortably, with the Israeli bomb, in 2008 they threatened to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) if Israel declared its nuclear status. Moreover, some Arab states, especially Egypt, could face increasing popular pressure to challenge Israel's nuclear monopoly, as Iran is now doing.
Opacity may have been justified when Israel had just acquired the bomb and the United States did not wish to confront this reality openly. However, today Israel's nuclear policy clashes with both emerging global nuclear norms and democratic principles, and it prevents Israel from arguing that it is a responsible nuclear power. Above all, Israel's nuclear monopoly in the Middle East is now facing two key challenges. The first is Iran's determined effort to acquire nuclear weapons under the cover of an ostensibly peaceful atomic energy program; the second is growing international support for the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, as manifested in the final declaration of the recent NPT Review Conference.
An additional challenge is that the Netanyahu government's policy toward the Palestinians is widely viewed both within and outside Israel as undermining the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and a lasting two-state solution. Given that Israel's legitimacy as a de facto nuclear weapons state rests on its broader political legitimacy, the connection between political and nuclear issues cannot be ignored.
Finally, there is growing recognition globally that the nuclear status quo is dangerous -- primarily because deterrence can no longer be relied on to prevent the acquisition and possible use of nuclear weapons by both states and nonstate actors. This has increased support for the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons -- which raises the question of whether Israel can afford not to be part of this ongoing international debate.Israel could increase its credibility as a responsible nuclear state in various ways, but almost all of them would require relaxing the policy of opacity, without fully abandoning it. This policy made strategic and political sense 40 years ago, but in today's regional and international climate, it has more vices than virtues.
DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL
In 1958, Israel began secretly constructing a nuclear center in Dimona with French assistance. The United States did not learn about the Dimona site until late 1960, and responding to it posed a challenge for U.S. policymakers. Only 15 years after the end of the Holocaust and before international nuclear nonproliferation norms existed, Israel's founders believed that they had a compelling case for acquiring the bomb, although there was disagreement about whether to openly argue that case, as Meir urged, or to conceal the entire project, as David Ben-Gurion insisted. As prime minister at the time, Ben-Gurion prevailed.
In the early 1960s, Washington saw Israel as a small and friendly state surrounded by much larger enemies vowing to destroy it; moreover, Israel enjoyed strong support among U.S. voters. Yet the idea of a nuclear-armed Israel was perceived as antithetical to U.S. global and regional interests. President John F. Kennedy feared that without decisive global action to curb nuclear proliferation, the number of nuclear weapons states would inevitably rise and that Israel's acquisition of the bomb would undermine U.S. efforts to establish a global nonproliferation norm. He was also concerned that Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to increasing Soviet influence over Israel's Arab neighbors and a heightened risk of a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the event of another Arab-Israeli war. As a result of these concerns, in the spring of 1963, Kennedy pressed Ben-Gurion to permit annual U.S. visits to Dimona to verify Ben-Gurion's assurances that Israel had purely peaceful intentions when it came to its nuclear program.
Such regular visits began in 1964. Israel's new prime minister, Levi Eshkol, reiterated Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres' ambiguous pledge to Kennedy in 1962 that Israel would not be the first state to "introduce" nuclear weapons to the region. This effectively foreclosed the option of a public nuclear test. But Israel still had some leeway. The timing of the visits, the limited access granted to the inspectors, and the concealment of key operations ensured that the U.S. intelligence community found no incriminating weapons-related activities. This was accepted by the Johnson administration, which wanted to avoid a confrontation with Israel on the nuclear issue.
By the time of the Six-Day War, in June 1967, Israel had secretly crossed the nuclear threshold. At the time, the Johnson administration's nonproliferation priority was to enlist support for the newly negotiated NPT. The United States tried to pressure Israel to sign the NPT as a nonnuclear weapons state, but Israel resisted. And by 1969, when President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir took office, it became clear to U.S. policymakers -- particularly Nixon and Kissinger -- that Israel probably already had a so-called bomb in the basement. Moreover, they knew Israel was reluctant either to give it up or to declare itself as a nuclear power by public acknowledgment or testing. A new understanding between the United States and Israel was needed.
In July 1969, Kissinger wrote to Nixon, "Our interest is in preventing Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. But since we cannot -- and may not want to try [to] -- control the state of Israel's nuclear program and since Israel may already have nuclear weapons, the one objective we might achieve is to persuade them to keep what they have secret." The recently declassified Kissinger memo goes on to argue that "this would meet our objective because the international implications of an Israeli program are not triggered until it becomes public knowledge." On September 26, 1969, Nixon and Meir reached a new agreement at the White House. Israel committed itself not to test its atomic weapons, advertise its possession of them, or threaten any other state with its newfound nuclear capability -- an arrangement that the United States was willing to tolerate. Washington, in turn, would end its visits to Dimona and stop pressuring Israel to sign the NPT. Over time, U.S. tolerance has evolved into a policy of shielding Israel's nuclear capabilities from international scrutiny.
In order to deal effectively with the new regional nuclear environment and emerging global nuclear norms, Israel must reassess the wisdom of its unwavering commitment to opacity
Nixon's rationale for becoming Israel's partner in opacity probably included both considerations of realpolitik and sympathy for the small Jewish state's need to have an existential insurance policy. Israel had already crossed the nuclear threshold, and it could be counted on as a democratic ally of the United States in its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. Nixon also apparently trusted Meir as a responsible custodian of Israel's nuclear weapons. But as the Nixon-Meir accord enters its fifth decade, it is fair to ask whether this secret deal is still the best way for Israel to conduct its nuclear affairs. And if not, what are the alternatives?
AMBIGUITY'S HALF-LIFE
In Israel, opacity is viewed almost universally as the most prudent response -- indeed, the only possible response -- Israel could have fashioned to its nuclear dilemma.
Despite Israel's victory in its War of Independence, in 1948, Ben-Gurion was haunted by the nightmare that the Arab states, acting together, could overwhelm Israel's conventional forces. Thus, under his leadership, Israel seized the opportunity to acquire a nuclear deterrent starting in the 1950s. However, nuclear weapons were viewed as "a last resort," in case Israel's conventional forces failed, and Ben-Gurion was not prepared politically to openly declare Israel a nuclear state.
Today, opacity continues to have almost universal support among members of the Israeli security establishment, who contend that as long as Israel maintains its regional nuclear monopoly, opacity should continue to guide the country's nuclear affairs. Short of the imminence of a new nuclear state in the region, they believe, Israel must do everything possible to maintain the policy and practice of opacity. Indeed, as the Iranian nuclear threat has grown more ominous, the commitment to opacity appears to have been strengthened -- most recently in a 2004 review of Israel's national security strategy headed by Dan Meridor, now the deputy prime minister in charge of intelligence and atomic energy.
Senior Israeli officials insist -- always off the record -- that the policy of opacity is not a dogma and its continuity is not an article of faith. However, each review of the policy to date has concluded that there is no viable alternative to opacity and that a public acknowledgment of Israel's nuclear status would pose a major national security risk. Israel therefore enjoys remarkable and unparalleled freedom of action in the nuclear sphere. After a stormy decade in which Israel's nuclear program was a continuous source of irritation and friction between the United States and Israel, the 1969 deal made the United States a silent partner in Israel's policy of opacity. Ever since, Washington has provided Israel with significant diplomatic cover vis-à-vis the NPT regime. Over time, most other countries have followed the United States' lead, accepting Israel's opaque nuclear posture and treating Israel's nuclear program as an exceptional case.
Despite concerns that the advent of Israeli nuclear weapons would exacerbate the Arab-Israeli conflict, the politics of opacity created a reality that was more benign than anybody expected. Opacity has in fact moderated and eased Arabs' ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons. By not publicly flaunting its nuclear status, Israel has reduced its neighbors' incentives to proliferate. Finally, opacity makes it easier to resist increasing demands that Israel give up its nuclear shield before a just and durable peace is established in the Middle East -- what Israelis commonly refer to as the "slippery slope" toward premature denuclearization.
Indeed, opacity has become much more than a government policy. Israel's nuclear ambiguity and the bomb itself have become essentially inseparable, and thus it is difficult for Israelis to debate whether and under what conditions Israel could continue to have the bomb without the opaque cover that now shrouds it from public view. The time for that debate has come.
THE BUNDY DOCTRINE
The first time we heard a plea for Israel to abandon its policy of opacity was in the spring of 1992, in a meeting we organized to enable U.S. and Israeli security experts and government officials to reflect on the issue of nuclear weapons in the Middle East after the first Gulf War. To the surprise of all present, and the discomfort of some of the attendees, our keynote speaker, the late former U.S. national security adviser McGeorge Bundy urged Israel to "come clean" about its nuclear status in order to reduce the risk of proliferation and the potential use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
Less than two years later, Bundy co-authored a book, Reducing Nuclear Danger, with U.S. Admiral William Crowe and the theoretical physicist Sidney Drell. They argued that all three existing de facto nuclear weapons states -- Israel, India, and Pakistan -- should acknowledge their true nuclear status. On matters of nuclear weapons, the authors maintained, the international community could no longer tolerate evading the truth. The possession of nuclear weapons was too serious a matter -- for the states involved, for their neighbors, and for the entire world -- to be left unacknowledged. With specific reference to Israel, the three authors suggested that "the fiction" of opacity was so "perverse" that it prevented Israelis from seeing their own best interests. As they put it, "The pretense [of opacity] prevents any public defense of the Israeli program by the Israeli government and any effective argument that no state or group need fear an Israeli bomb unless it attempts the destruction of Israel."
It is unclear whether Bundy knew all the details of the Nixon-Meir accord, but he and his co-authors suggested that the United States should end its own participation in the policy of opacity and state in public that it considers Israel to be a nuclear weapons state. "Such a statement would clarify an important reality, would follow the guidelines of openness, and help the Israelis themselves to tell the truth," they wrote. Ultimately, however, the burden of disclosure would fall on the Israelis themselves: "The best way out of this cul-de-sac," they maintained, "is Israeli openness by Israeli decision."
Bundy's argument is even more salient today than it was in the 1990s. Moreover, opacity makes it very difficult for Israel to engage seriously in negotiations on arms control and disarmament in both the regional and the global context. A case in point is the proposed Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. Compliance with such an agreement by Israel would require Israel to allow verification that it had ceased production of unsafeguarded plutonium at its Dimona reactor. Although a complete shutdown of the reactor could be verified remotely, it is widely assumed that the reactor also produces tritium -- a hydrogen isotope used in advanced nuclear weapons -- the production of which is not banned by the treaty. Thus, verification of a cutoff in the production of plutonium, specifically, would require intrusive on-site inspections, and these are not compatible with the pretense that Israel is not a nuclear weapons state.
The perceived need to maintain opacity can become a convenient excuse for not engaging in arms control and disarmament initiatives that could actually serve Israel's interests. Whereas India and Pakistan are now recognized and treated as weapons states, Israel remains in the nuclear shadow, as if its moral and political case for the bomb were weaker than New Delhi's or Islamabad's or those of the established NPT weapons states.
Ironically, the nuclear policy that served Israel's interest in the 1950s and 1960s is now an obstacle to achieving its political and diplomatic objectives. In the early days of its nuclear program, Israel had no concerns about legitimacy, recognition, and status; all it cared about was acquiring a nuclear capability. The virtue of the Nixon-Meir accord was that it allowed Israel to do just that. Today, the situation is different. Israel is now a mature nuclear weapons state, but it finds it difficult under the strictures of opacity to make a convincing case that it is a responsible one.
A RESPONSIBLE NUCLEAR POWER
In recent years, leaders of the Israeli nuclear establishment have emphasized, in the words of Gideon Frank, vice chair of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, "Israel's long-standing commitment to norms of security, responsibility, accountability, and restraint in the nuclear domain." Although fully consistent with nuclear opacity, this new terminology allows Israel to promote its credentials as a supporter of the international nonproliferation regime. This represents a tacit but significant shift from Israel's past nuclear policy, which, for decades, was characterized by a determined effort to achieve an advanced nuclear capability outside the norms of the regime.
Having attained such a capability, Israel has shifted its priority to burnishing its image as a democratic, responsible nuclear state and thus, although still not an NPT signatory, placing itself on the right side of the global nuclear order and distinguishing itself from autocratic, rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions, such as the current government of Iran.
The behavior of regimes should no doubt be considered in devising strategies to prevent proliferation. However, regimes change. Pre-1979 Iran was encouraged by the United States, France, and West Germany to invest heavily in nuclear power plants, together with the associated technology and expertise, and a hostile regime in Tehran is now using civilian nuclear technology as a cover for obtaining nuclear weapons. As the Swedish physicist and Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén once observed, "Atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins." Attempts to deal with this long-standing problem by encouraging nonnuclear weapons states not to acquire dual-use technologies, such as those for uranium enrichment, have met with considerable skepticism in a world already divided between nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots.
To demonstrate its support for the international nonproliferation regime, Israel points out that it plays an active role in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, has harmonized its nuclear export control legislation and regulations with the guidelines of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, is a state party to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, and has cooperated with the committee charged with implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1540, which obligates all UN member states to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Nuclear analysts, such as George Perkovich and Pierre Goldschmidt of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also emphasize that Israel has never threatened the existence of any other state with nuclear weapons, or by any other means, and that it is a responsible custodian of nuclear weapons with respect to both its nuclear doctrine and the procedures it has in place to govern their use. Specifically, they infer that Israel's doctrine remains one of "defensive last resort" and that its procedural safeguards are designed to minimize the risk of inadvertent or accidental use.
Obviously, there are matters that democratic governments need to keep secret, but transparency is vital to preserving democratic institutions. This is especially true with regard to nuclear weapons policy, an area in which decision-making is commonly the province of a small elite. To the extent that opacity keeps both the Israeli public and the rest of the world in the dark about Israel's capability, it undercuts the need for Israelis to be informed about issues that are literally matters of life and death: Whose finger is on the nuclear trigger? Under what circumstances would the country's nuclear weapons be used? And what are the occupational hazards and environmental risks posed by the possession and continued manufacturing of nuclear weapons?
There should not be an end to all secrecy on nuclear matters; the balance between the legitimate need for secrecy and the desire for transparency needs to be carefully considered. However, nearly five decades after Prime Minister Eshkol told the Israeli Knesset that Israel would not "introduce" nuclear weapons to the region, neither he nor any of his successors has ever elaborated on the meaning of this ambiguous statement. Times have changed, and as long as Israel adheres strictly to the policy of opacity, it cannot address concerns about its nuclear capability or about the seriousness of its commitment to a NWFZ in the Middle East, which it has advocated since 1980.The former Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu's revelations about Dimona to the London Sunday Times in 1986 have led to claims that Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear devices and battlefield weapons such as neutron bombs and nuclear artillery shells. Such an arsenal would seem to be incompatible with a nuclear doctrine of "defensive last resort." And it remains unclear what "defensive last resort" means in practice, in particular with regard to how Israel would respond to an attack with biological or chemical weapons.
Israel should demonstrate that it is serious about its commitment to a NWFZ in the Middle East provided that a just and durable peace is achieved first. It should also acknowledge the inherent dangers of possessing nuclear weapons, even by "responsible" nuclear states. Progress toward a peace deal should proceed in conjunction with arms control measures short of complete denuclearization.
The difficulties involved in realizing a nuclear-free world, such as verifying and punishing noncompliance, have been acknowledged by many of its proponents, including Obama. What is significant about the current global debate is the growing consensus that the nuclear status quo is dangerous, especially with regard to the inadequacy of nuclear deterrence to deal with the growing danger that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of nonstate actors. Thus, the final declaration of the recently concluded NPT Review Conference underlined the support of all the NPT member states for Article 6 of the treaty, which calls for "negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament."
Although Israel supports measures to reduce the risk of proliferation and nuclear terrorism, as a non-NPT state it is not obligated to voice its support for Article 6. Nevertheless, Israel should make explicit that its support of a NWFZ in the Middle East also implies support of Article 6 of the NPT and of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Such a statement should endorse the perspective of the late Shalheveth Freier -- the senior Israeli nuclear official who translated the Nixon-Meir opacity accord into a national doctrine. Freier argued in 1993 that "nuclear weapons are bad" for a number of reasons: they are so destructive that irreparable damage can be done, and second thoughts cannot redress that damage; they cause lasting and pernicious injury to people and the environment; they could proliferate to countries that might feel less inhibited in contemplating their use than the established nuclear weapons states; once a nuclear weapon has been employed in an actual conflict, there is no credible barrier to the escalation of their use and destructive power; and, finally, proliferation to a regime facing internal challenges to its rule or not exercising complete control over its military could have devastating consequences.
POLITICAL FALLOUT
The Israeli bomb became opaque soon after its birth and remains so today. Yet unlike 50 years ago, Israel today needs to bolster its credentials as a democratic state that seeks a just peace with the Palestinian people and to deal effectively with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran -- challenges that require a reconsideration of its opaque nuclear posture.
International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the policies that support that occupation, such as settlement construction, house demolitions, and restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, all of which are widely perceived as undermining a genuine commitment to the establishment of a just and durable peace in the Middle East. What happens in the West Bank may have consequences in Dimona. For example, the Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit, who strongly supports Israel's retention of its nuclear shield, has observed that "the West is not prepared to accept Israel as an occupying state."
Such international criticism might well spill over into the nuclear domain, making Israel increasingly vulnerable to the charge that it is a nuclear-armed pariah state. This associates Israel to an uncomfortable degree with today's rogue Iranian regime and the old apartheid government in South Africa. This charge needs to be countered by displaying a genuine commitment to the pursuit of peace and a willingness to modify the policy of opacity in order to reinforce Israel's credentials as a responsible nuclear state. Obviously, those who contest Israel's right to exist as an independent state and to possess a nuclear deterrent to secure that right are unlikely to change their views even if Israel alters its political and nuclear posture. However, there is a deep reservoir of goodwill toward Israel and admiration for its accomplishments in many countries. Altering its present course would significantly increase the support Israel now receives in the international community.
Agreeing to the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty or to a ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing in the region would be problematic for both Israel and its neighbors at the moment. For Israel, such agreements would be incompatible with opacity; for the Arab states, they would legitimate an Israeli nuclear monopoly. However, Israel could take other steps on its own in the near term, whose cumulative impact would be to increase confidence in Israel's support of global norms to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Specifically, Israel should ratify both the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Given Israel's formidable conventional military capabilities -- specifically, its edge in the quality of both its manpower and its technology, its aircraft in particular -- as well as its nuclear deterrent, Israel can stand with the 188 states that are already parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention without any loss of national security and thus indicate that it views the use of chemical weapons as abhorrent and unnecessary. The same considerations should motivate Israel to join the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
It is also important for Israel to follow the lead of the United States in its latest Nuclear Posture Review, which significantly circumscribed the role of nuclear weapons as a means of responding to a biological or chemical attack. In particular, the new U.S. posture indicates that although the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack is not out of the question, the primary role of nuclear weapons is to deter their use by other states. Obviously, under the current policy of opacity, Israel cannot make a public statement of this kind. The policy of opacity should be loosened so that Israel can become both a more responsible and more legitimate nuclear state -- and be perceived as such by the international community.
Almost all states publicly oppose the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, but the willingness to take strong measures to achieve this goal is very limited. Even the United States, Israel's closest ally, seems unsure about how far it should go to counter the nuclear ambitions of a country whose president commonly refers to Israel as "an illegal political entity that is bound to disappear from the pages of history." And although global concerns about nuclear weapons in the Middle East are focused on Iran's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons rather than Israel's "bomb in the basement," there is also widespread support for dealing with this problem in an evenhanded manner, namely, by establishing a NWFZ in the region.
Faced with such a situation, Israel feels isolated and under siege -- a mentality that has deep roots in its history. However, Israel should resist the view that unilateral military action is its only option for dealing with the perceived Iranian threat to its existence. Although Israel has previously bombed nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria to protect its nuclear monopoly in the region, the challenge it faces from Iran today is much greater, especially since Tehran's precise level of nuclear advancement is so difficult to discern. In particular, it is not clear whether Iran has made a decision to build actual nuclear weapons or simply decided to maintain a "latent" nuclear capability -- essentially coming as close to the bomb as technically possible without actually completing it and thus precipitating a strong reaction from other states, especially Israel.
Israel has the ability to influence Iran's calculations by means other than military action. If Israel takes seriously the need to modify its own nuclear posture and its approach to the peace process, the international community, including key countries, such as China, India, and Russia, that do not now back strong measures against Iran, is likely to be much more supportive of measures designed to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold and to contain a nuclear-armed Iran if those efforts fail. Increased, coordinated international resistance to an Iranian bomb (or latent nuclear capability) could also influence the debate in Tehran about the wisdom of continuing to defy the international community.
Abandoning opacity involves many risks and should be pursued cautiously. It would not be prudent at present to take the option of military action against Iran's nuclear facilities off the table entirely. However, a loosening of Israel's decades-old policy of opacity would allow Israel to become a fuller partner in the international nonproliferation regime, improve its image as a responsible nuclear power, and enhance its democratic transparency at home by informing the Israeli public about the fateful decisions that are being made on its behalf regarding the bomb.
Israel was not the first state to acquire nuclear weapons, and given its unique geopolitical concerns, it should not be expected to lead the world into the nuclear-free age. But in order to deal effectively with the new regional nuclear environment and emerging global nuclear norms, Israel must reassess the wisdom of its unwavering commitment to opacity and also recognize that international support for its retaining its military edge, including its nuclear capability, rests on its retaining its moral edge.
RETHINKING THE NATIONAL INTEREST | FOREIGN AFFAIRS
By Condoleezza Rice
What is the national interest? This is a question that I took up in 2000 in these pages. That was a time that we as a nation revealingly called "the post-Cold War era." We knew better where we had been than where we were going. Yet monumental changes were unfolding -- changes that were recognized at the time but whose implications were largely unclear.
And then came the attacks of September 11, 2001. As in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States was swept into a fundamentally different world. We were called to lead with a new urgency and with a new perspective on what constituted threats and what might emerge as opportunities. And as with previous strategic shocks, one can cite elements of both continuity and change in our foreign policy since the attacks of September 11.
What has not changed is that our relations with traditional and emerging great powers still matter to the successful conduct of policy. Thus, my admonition in 2000 that we should seek to get right the "relationships with the big powers" -- Russia, China, and emerging powers such as India and Brazil -- has consistently guided us. As before, our alliances in the Americas, Europe, and Asia remain the pillars of the international order, and we are now transforming them to meet the challenges of a new era.
What has changed is, most broadly, how we view the relationship between the dynamics within states and the distribution of power among them. As globalization strengthens some states, it exposes and exacerbates the failings of many others -- those too weak or poorly governed to address challenges within their borders and prevent them from spilling out and destabilizing the international order. In this strategic environment, it is vital to our national security that states be willing and able to meet the full range of their sovereign responsibilities, both beyond their borders and within them. This new reality has led us to some significant changes in our policy. We recognize that democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest. And in the broader Middle East, we recognize that freedom and democracy are the only ideas that can, over time, lead to just and lasting stability, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.As in the past, our policy has been sustained not just by our strength but also by our values. The United States has long tried to marry power and principle -- realism and idealism. At times, there have been short-term tensions between them. But we have always known where our long-term interests lie. Thus, the United States has not been neutral about the importance of human rights or the superiority of democracy as a form of government, both in principle and in practice. This uniquely American realism has guided us over the past eight years, and it must guide us over the years to come.
GREAT POWER, OLD AND NEW
By necessity, our relationships with Russia and China have been rooted more in common interests than common values. With Russia, we have found common ground, as evidenced by the "strategic framework" agreement that President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed in Sochi in March of this year. Our relationship with Russia has been sorely tested by Moscow's rhetoric, by its tendency to treat its neighbors as lost "spheres of influence," and by its energy policies that have a distinct political tinge. And Russia's internal course has been a source of considerable disappointment, especially because in 2000 we hoped that it was moving closer to us in terms of values. Yet it is useful to remember that Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is neither a permanent enemy nor a strategic threat. Russians now enjoy greater opportunity and, yes, personal freedom than at almost any other time in their country's history. But that alone is not the standard to which Russians themselves want to be held. Russia is not just a great power; it is also the land and culture of a great people. And in the twenty-first century, greatness is increasingly defined by the technological and economic development that flows naturally in open and free societies. That is why the full development both of Russia and of our relationship with it still hangs in the balance as the country's internal transformation unfolds.
The last eight years have also challenged us to deal with rising Chinese influence, something we have no reason to fear if that power is used responsibly. We have stressed to Beijing that with China's full membership in the international community comes responsibilities, whether in the conduct of its economic and trade policy, its approach to energy and the environment, or its policies in the developing world. China's leaders increasingly realize this, and they are moving, albeit slowly, to a more cooperative approach on a range of problems. For instance, on Darfur, after years of unequivocally supporting Khartoum, China endorsed the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the deployment of a hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force and dispatched an engineering battalion to pave the way for those peacekeepers. China needs to do much more on issues such as Darfur, Burma, and Tibet, but we sustain an active and candid dialogue with China's leaders on these challenges.
The United States, along with many other countries, remains concerned about China's rapid development of high-tech weapons systems. We understand that as countries develop, they will modernize their armed forces. But China's lack of transparency about its military spending and doctrine and its strategic goals increases mistrust and suspicion. Although Beijing has agreed to take incremental steps to deepen U.S.-Chinese military-to-military exchanges, it needs to move beyond the rhetoric of peaceful intentions toward true engagement in order to reassure the international community.
Our relationships with Russia and China are complex and characterized simultaneously by competition and cooperation. But in the absence of workable relations with both of these states, diplomatic solutions to many international problems would be elusive. Transnational terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change and instability stemming from poverty and disease -- these are dangers to all successful states, including those that might in another time have been violent rivals. It is incumbent on the United States to find areas of cooperation and strategic agreement with Russia and China, even when there are significant differences.
Obviously, Russia and China carry special responsibility and weight as fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council, but this has not been the only forum in which we have worked together. Another example has emerged in Northeast Asia with the six-party framework. The North Korean nuclear issue could have led to conflict among the states of Northeast Asia, or to the isolation of the United States, given the varied and vital interests of China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. Instead, it has become an opportunity for cooperation and coordination as the efforts toward verifiable denuclearization proceed. And when North Korea tested a nuclear device last year, the five other parties already were an established coalition and went quickly to the Security Council for a Chapter 7 resolution. That, in turn, put considerable pressure on North Korea to return to the six-party talks and to shut down and begin disabling its Yongbyon reactor. The parties intend to institutionalize these habits of cooperation through the establishment of a Northeast Asian Peace and Security Mechanism -- a first step toward a security forum in the region.
The importance of strong relations with global players extends to those that are emerging. With those, particularly India and Brazil, the United States has built deeper and broader ties. India stands on the front lines of globalization. This democratic nation promises to become a global power and an ally in shaping an international order rooted in freedom and the rule of law. Brazil's success at using democracy and markets to address centuries of pernicious social inequality has global resonance. Today, India and Brazil look outward as never before, secure in their ability to compete and succeed in the global economy. In both countries, national interests are being redefined as Indians and Brazilians realize their direct stake in a democratic, secure, and open international order -- and their commensurate responsibilities for strengthening it and defending it against the major transnational challenges of our era. We have a vital interest in the success and prosperity of these and other large multiethnic democracies with global reach, such as Indonesia and South Africa. And as these emerging powers change the geopolitical landscape, it will be important that international institutions also change to reflect this reality. This is why President Bush has made clear his support for a reasonable expansion of the UN Security Council.
SHARED VALUES AND SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
As important as relations are with Russia and China, it is our work with our allies, those with whom we share values, that is transforming international politics -- for this work presents an opportunity to expand the ranks of well-governed, law-abiding democratic states in our world and to defeat challenges to this vision of international order. Cooperation with our democratic allies, therefore, should not be judged simply by how we relate to one another. It should be judged by the work we do together to defeat terrorism and extremism, meet global challenges, defend human rights and dignity, and support new democracies.
In the Americas, this has meant strengthening our ties with strategic democracies such as Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Chile in order to further the democratic development of our hemisphere. Together, we have supported struggling states, such as Haiti, in locking in their transitions to democracy and security. Together, we are defending ourselves against drug traffickers, criminal gangs, and the few autocratic outliers in our democratic hemisphere. The region still faces challenges, including Cuba's coming transition and the need to support, unequivocally, the Cuban people's right to a democratic future. There is no doubt that centuries-old suspicions of the United States persist in the region. But we have begun to write a new narrative that speaks not only to macroeconomic development and trade but also to the need for democratic leaders to address problems of social justice and inequality.
I believe that one of the most compelling stories of our time is our relationship with our oldest allies. The goal of a Europe whole, free, and at peace is very close to completion. The United States welcomes a strong, united, and coherent Europe. There is no doubt that the European Union has been a superb anchor for the democratic evolution of eastern Europe after the Cold War. Hopefully, the day will come when Turkey takes its place in the EU.
Membership in the EU and NATO has been attractive enough to lead countries to make needed reforms and to seek the peaceful resolution of long-standing conflicts with their neighbors. The reverse has been true as well: the new members have transformed these two pillars of the transatlantic relationship. Twelve of the 28 members of NATO are former "captive nations," countries once in the Soviet sphere. The effect of their joining the alliance is felt in a renewed dedication to promoting and protecting democracy. Whether sending troops to Afghanistan or Iraq or fiercely defending the continued expansion of NATO, these states have brought new energy and fervor to the alliance.
In recent years, the mission and the purpose of the alliance have also been transformed. Indeed, many can remember when NATO viewed the world in two parts: Europe and "out of area," which was basically everywhere else. If someone had said in 2000 that NATO today would be rooting out terrorists in Kandahar, training the security forces of a free Iraq, providing critical support to peacekeepers in Darfur, and moving forward on missile defenses, hopefully in partnership with Russia, who would have believed him? The endurance and resilience of the transatlantic alliance is one reason that I believe Lord Palmerston got it wrong when he said that nations have no permanent allies. The United States does have permanent allies: the nations with whom we share common values.
Democratization is also deepening across the Asia-Pacific region. This is expanding our circle of allies and advancing the goals we share. Indeed, although many assume that the rise of China will determine the future of Asia, so, too -- and perhaps to an even greater degree -- will the broader rise of an increasingly democratic community of Asian states. This is the defining geopolitical event of the twenty-first century, and the United States is right in the middle of it. We enjoy a strong, democratic alliance with Australia, with key states in Southeast Asia, and with Japan -- an economic giant that is emerging as a "normal" state, capable of working to secure and spread our values both in Asia and beyond. South Korea, too, has become a global partner whose history can boast an inspiring journey from poverty and dictatorship to democracy and prosperity. Finally, the United States has a vital stake in India's rise to global power and prosperity, and relations between the two countries have never been stronger or broader. It will take continued work, but this is a dramatic breakthrough for both our strategic interests and our values.
It is now possible to speak of emerging democratic allies in Africa as well. Too often, Africa is thought of only as a humanitarian concern or a zone of conflict. But the continent has seen successful transitions to democracy in several states, among them Ghana, Liberia, Mali, and Mozambique. Our administration has worked to help the democratic leaders of these and other states provide for their people -- most of all by attacking the continental scourge of HIV/AIDS in an unprecedented effort of power, imagination, and mercy. We have also been an active partner in resolving conflicts -- from the conclusion of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the civil war between the North and the South in Sudan, to active engagement in the Great Lakes region, to the intervention of a small contingent of U.S. military forces in coordination with the African Union to end the conflict in Liberia. Although conflicts in Darfur, Somalia, and other places tragically remain violent and unresolved, it is worth noting the considerable progress that African states are making on many fronts and the role that the United States has played in supporting African efforts to solve the continent's greatest problems.
A DEMOCRATIC MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT
Although the United States' ability to influence strong states is limited, our ability to enhance the peaceful political and economic development of weak and poorly governed states can be considerable. We must be willing to use our power for this purpose -- not only because it is necessary but also because it is right. Too often, promoting democracy and promoting development are thought of as separate goals. In fact, it is increasingly clear that the practices and institutions of democracy are essential to the creation of sustained, broad-based economic development -- and that market-driven development is essential to the consolidation of democracy. Democratic development is a unified political-economic model, and it offers the mix of flexibility and stability that best enables states to seize globalization's opportunities and manage its challenges. And for those who think otherwise: What real alternative worthy of America is there?
Democratic development is not only an effective path to wealth and power; it is also the best way to ensure that these benefits are shared justly across entire societies, without exclusion, repression, or violence. We saw this recently in Kenya, where democracy enabled civil society, the press, and business leaders to join together to insist on an inclusive political bargain that could stem the country's slide into ethnic cleansing and lay a broader foundation for national reconciliation. In our own hemisphere, democratic development has opened up old, elite-dominated systems to millions on the margins of society. These people are demanding the benefits of citizenship long denied them, and because they are doing so democratically, the real story in our hemisphere since 2001 is not that our neighbors have given up on democracy and open markets; it is that they are broadening our region's consensus in support of democratic development by ensuring that it leads to social justice for the most marginalized citizens.
The untidiness of democracy has led some to wonder if weak states might not be better off passing through a period of authoritarian capitalism. A few countries have indeed succeeded with this model, and its allure is only heightened when democracy is too slow in delivering or incapable of meeting high expectations for a better life. Yet for every state that embraces authoritarianism and manages to create wealth, there are many, many more that simply make poverty, inequality, and corruption worse. For those that are doing pretty well economically, it is worth asking whether they might be doing even better with a freer system. Ultimately, it is at least an open question whether authoritarian capitalism is itself an indefinitely sustainable model. Is it really possible in the long run for governments to respect their citizen's talents but not their rights? I, for one, doubt it.
For the United States, promoting democratic development must remain a top priority. Indeed, there is no realistic alternative that we can -- or should -- offer to influence the peaceful evolution of weak and poorly governed states. The real question is not whether to pursue this course but how.
We first need to recognize that democratic development is always possible but never fast or easy. This is because democracy is really the complex interplay of democratic practices and culture. In the experience of countless nations, ours especially, we see that culture is not destiny. Nations of every culture, race, religion, and level of development have embraced democracy and adapted it to their own circumstances and traditions. No cultural factor has yet been a stumbling block -- not German or Japanese "militarism," not "Asian values," not African "tribalism," not Latin America's alleged fondness for caudillos, not the once-purported preference of eastern Europeans for despotism.
The fact is, few nations begin the democratic journey with a democratic culture. The vast majority create one over time -- through the hard, daily struggle to make good laws, build democratic institutions, tolerate differences, resolve them peacefully, and share power justly. Unfortunately, it is difficult to grow the habits of democracy in the controlled environment of authoritarianism, to have them ready and in place when tyranny is lifted. The process of democratization is likely to be messy and unsatisfactory, but it is absolutely necessary. Democracy, it is said, cannot be imposed, particularly by a foreign power. This is true but beside the point. It is more likely that tyranny has to be imposed.
The story today is rarely one of peoples resisting the basics of democracy -- the right to choose those who will govern them and other basic freedoms. It is, instead, about people choosing democratic leaders and then becoming impatient with them and holding them accountable on their duty to deliver a better life. It is strongly in our national interest to help sustain these leaders, support their countries' democratic institutions, and ensure that their new governments are capable of providing for their own security, especially when their nations have experienced crippling conflicts. To do so will require long-term partnerships rooted in mutual responsibility and the integration of all elements of our national power -- political, diplomatic, economic, and, at times, military. We have recently built such partnerships to great effect with countries as different as Colombia, Lebanon, and Liberia. Indeed, a decade ago, Colombia was on the verge of failure. Today, in part because of our long-term partnership with courageous leaders and citizens, Colombia is emerging as a normal nation, with democratic institutions that are defending the country, governing justly, reducing poverty, and contributing to international security.
We must now build long-term partnerships with other new and fragile democracies, especially Afghanistan. The basics of democracy are taking root in this country after nearly three decades of tyranny, violence, and war. For the first time in their history, Afghans have a government of the people, elected in presidential and parliamentary elections, and guided by a constitution that codifies the rights of all citizens. The challenges in Afghanistan do not stem from a strong enemy. The Taliban offers a political vision that very few Afghans embrace. Rather, they exploit the current limitations of the Afghan government, using violence against civilians and revenues from illegal narcotics to impose their rule. Where the Afghan government, with support from the international community, has been able to provide good governance and economic opportunity, the Taliban is in retreat. The United States and NATO have a vital interest in supporting the emergence of an effective, democratic Afghan state that can defeat the Taliban and deliver "population security" -- addressing basic needs for safety, services, the rule of law, and increased economic opportunity. We share this goal with the Afghan people, who do not want us to leave until we have accomplished our common mission. We can succeed in Afghanistan, but we must be prepared to sustain a partnership with that new democracy for many years to come.
One of our best tools for supporting states in building democratic institutions and strengthening civil society is our foreign assistance, but we must use it correctly. One of the great advances of the past eight years has been the creation of a bipartisan consensus for the more strategic use of foreign assistance. We have begun to transform our assistance into an incentive for developing states to govern justly, advance economic freedom, and invest in their people. This is the great innovation of the Millennium Challenge Account initiative. More broadly, we are now better aligning our foreign aid with our foreign policy goals -- so as to help developing countries move from war to peace, poverty to prosperity, poor governance to democracy and the rule of law. At the same time, we have launched historic efforts to help remove obstacles to democratic development -- by forgiving old debts, feeding the hungry, expanding access to education, and fighting pandemics such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. Behind all of these efforts is the overwhelming generosity of the American people, who since 2001 have supported the near tripling of the United States' official development assistance worldwide -- doubling it for Latin America and quadrupling it for Africa.
Ultimately, one of the best ways to support the growth of democratic institutions and civil society is to expand free and fair trade and investment. The very process of implementing a trade agreement or a bilateral investment treaty helps to hasten and consolidate democratic development. Legal and political institutions that can enforce property rights are better able to protect human rights and the rule of law. Independent courts that can resolve commercial disputes can better resolve civil and political disputes. The transparency needed to fight corporate corruption makes it harder for political corruption to go unnoticed and unpunished. A rising middle class also creates new centers of social power for political movements and parties. Trade is a divisive issue in our country right now, but we must not forget that it is essential not only for the health of our domestic economy but also for the success our foreign policy.
There will always be humanitarian needs, but our goal must be to use the tools of foreign assistance, security cooperation, and trade together to help countries graduate to self-sufficiency. We must insist that these tools be used to promote democratic development. It is in our national interest to do so.
THE CHANGING MIDDLE EAST
What about the broader Middle East, the arc of states that stretches from Morocco to Pakistan? The Bush administration's approach to this region has been its most vivid departure from prior policy. But our approach is, in reality, an extension of traditional tenets -- incorporating human rights and the promotion of democratic development into a policy meant to further our national interest. What is exceptional is that the Middle East was treated as an exception for so many decades. U.S. policy there focused almost exclusively on stability. There was little dialogue, certainly not publicly, about the need for democratic change.
For six decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, a basic bargain defined the United States' engagement in the broader Middle East: we supported authoritarian regimes, and they supported our shared interest in regional stability. After September 11, it became increasingly clear that this old bargain had produced false stability. There were virtually no legitimate channels for political expression in the region. But this did not mean that there was no political activity. There was -- in madrasahs and radical mosques. It is no wonder that the best-organized political forces were extremist groups. And it was there, in the shadows, that al Qaeda found the troubled souls to prey on and exploit as its foot soldiers in its millenarian war against the "far enemy."
One response would have been to fight the terrorists without addressing this underlying cause. Perhaps it would have been possible to manage these suppressed tensions for a while. Indeed, the quest for justice and a new equilibrium on which the nations of the broader Middle East are now embarked is very turbulent. But is it really worse than the situation before? Worse than when Lebanon suffered under the boot of Syrian military occupation? Worse than when the self-appointed rulers of the Palestinians personally pocketed the world's generosity and squandered their best chance for a two-state peace? Worse than when the international community imposed sanctions on innocent Iraqis in order to punish the man who tyrannized them, threatened Iraq's neighbors, and bulldozed 300,000 human beings into unmarked mass graves? Or worse than the decades of oppression and denied opportunity that spawned hopelessness, fed hatreds, and led to the sort of radicalization that brought about the ideology behind the September 11 attacks? Far from being the model of stability that some seem to remember, the Middle East from 1945 on was wracked repeatedly by civil conflicts and cross-border wars. Our current course is certainly difficult, but let us not romanticize the old bargains of the Middle East -- for they yielded neither justice nor stability.
The president's second inaugural address and my speech at the American University in Cairo in June 2005 have been held up as rhetorical declarations that have faded in the face of hard realities. No one will argue that the goal of democratization and modernization in the broader Middle East lacks ambition, and we who support it fully acknowledge that it will be a difficult, generational task. No one event, and certainly not a speech, will bring it into being. But if America does not set the goal, no one will.
This goal is made more complicated by the fact that the future of the Middle East is bound up in many of our other vital interests: energy security, nonproliferation, the defense of friends and allies, the resolution of old conflicts, and, most of all, the need for near-term partners in the global struggle against violent Islamist extremism. To state, however, that we must promote either our security interests or our democratic ideals is to present a false choice. Admittedly, our interests and our ideals do come into tension at times in the short term. America is not an NGO and must balance myriad factors in our relations with all countries. But in the long term, our security is best ensured by the success of our ideals: freedom, human rights, open markets, democracy, and the rule of law.
The leaders and citizens of the broader Middle East are now searching for answers to the fundamental questions of modern state building: What are to be the limits on the state's use of power, both within and beyond its borders? What will be the role of the state in the lives of its citizens and the relationship between religion and politics? How will traditional values and mores be reconciled with the democratic promise of individual rights and liberty, particularly for women and girls? How is religious and ethnic diversity to be accommodated in fragile political institutions when people tend to hold on to traditional associations? The answers to these and other questions can come only from within the Middle East itself. The task for us is to support and shape these difficult processes of change and to help the nations of the region overcome several major challenges to their emergence as modern, democratic states.
The first challenge is the global ideology of violent Islamist extremism, as embodied by groups, such as al Qaeda, that thoroughly reject the basic tenets of modern politics, seeking instead to topple sovereign states, erase national borders, and restore the imperial structure of the ancient caliphate. To resist this threat, the United States will need friends and allies in the region who are willing and able to take action against the terrorists among them. Ultimately, however, this is more than just a struggle of arms; it is a contest of ideas. Al Qaeda's theory of victory is to hijack the legitimate local and national grievances of Muslim societies and twist them into an ideological narrative of endless struggle against Western, especially U.S., oppression. The good news is that al Qaeda's intolerant ideology can be enforced only through brutality and violence. When people are free to choose, as we have seen in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq's Anbar Province, they reject al Qaeda's ideology and rebel against its control. Our theory of victory, therefore, must be to offer people a democratic path to advance their interests peacefully -- to develop their talents, to redress injustices, and to live in freedom and dignity. In this sense, the fight against terrorism is a kind of global counterinsurgency: the center of gravity is not the enemies we fight but the societies they are trying to radicalize.
Admittedly, our interests in both promoting democratic development and fighting terrorism and extremism lead to some hard choices, because we do need capable friends in the broader Middle East who can root out terrorists now. These states are often not democratic, so we must balance the tensions between our short-term and our long-term goals. We cannot deny nondemocratic states the security assistance to fight terrorism or defend themselves. At the same time, we must use other points of leverage to promote democracy and hold our friends to account. That means supporting civil society, as we have done through the Forum for the Future and the Middle East Partnership Initiative, and using public and private diplomacy to push our nondemocratic partners to reform. Changes are slowly coming in terms of universal suffrage, more influential parliaments, and education for girls and women. We must continue to advocate for reform and support indigenous agents of change in nondemocratic countries, even as we cooperate with their governments on security.
An example of how our administration has balanced these concerns is our relationship with Pakistan. Following years of U.S. neglect of that relationship, our administration had to establish a partnership with Pakistan's military government to achieve a common goal after September 11. We did so knowing that our security and that of Pakistan ultimately required a return to civilian and democratic rule. So even as we worked with President Pervez Musharraf to fight terrorists and extremists, we invested more than $3 billion to strengthen Pakistani society -- building schools and health clinics, providing emergency relief after the 2005 earthquake, and supporting political parties and the rule of law. We urged Pakistan's military leaders to put their country on a modern and moderate trajectory, which in some important respects they did. And when this progress was threatened last year by the declaration of emergency rule, we pushed President Musharraf hard to take off his uniform and hold free elections. Although terrorists tried to thwart the return of democracy and tragically killed many innocent people, including former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani people dealt extremism a crushing defeat at the polls. This restoration of democracy in Pakistan creates an opportunity for us to build the lasting and broad-based partnership that we have never achieved with this nation, thereby enhancing our security and anchoring the success of our values in a troubled region.
A second challenge to the emergence of a better Middle East is posed by aggressive states that seek not to peacefully reform the present regional order but to alter it using any form of violence -- assassination, intimidation, terrorism. The question is not whether any particular state should have influence in the region. They all do, and will. The real question is, What kind of influence will these states wield -- and to what ends, constructive or destructive? It is this fundamental and still unresolved question that is at the center of many of the geopolitical challenges in the Middle East today -- whether it is Syria's undermining of Lebanon's sovereignty, Iran's pursuit of a nuclear capability, or both states' support for terrorism.
Iran poses a particular challenge. The Iranian regime pursues its disruptive policies both through state instruments, such as the Revolutionary Guards and the al Quds force, and through nonstate proxies that extend Iranian power, such as elements of the Mahdi Army in Iraq, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and around the world. The Iranian regime seeks to subvert states and extend its influence throughout the Persian Gulf region and the broader Middle East. It threatens the state of Israel with extinction and holds implacable hostility toward the United States. And it is destabilizing Iraq, endangering U.S. forces, and killing innocent Iraqis. The United States is responding to these provocations. Clearly, an Iran with a nuclear weapon or even the technology to build one on demand would be a grave threat to international peace and security.
But there is also another Iran. It is the land of a great culture and a great people, who suffer under repression. The Iranian people deserve to be integrated into the international system, to travel freely and be educated in the best universities. Indeed, the United States has reached out to them with exchanges of sports teams, disaster-relief workers, and artists. By many accounts, the Iranian people are favorably disposed to Americans and to the United States. Our relationship could be different. Should the Iranian government honor the UN Security Council's demands and suspend its uranium enrichment and related activities, the community of nations, including the United States, is prepared to discuss the full range of issues before us. The United States has no permanent enemies.
Ultimately, the many threats that Iran poses must be seen in a broader context: that of a state fundamentally out of step with the norms and values of the international community. Iran must make a strategic choice -- a choice that we have sought to clarify with our approach -- about how and to what ends it will wield its power and influence: Does it want to continue thwarting the legitimate demands of the world, advancing its interests through violence, and deepening the isolation of its people? Or is it open to a better relationship, one of growing trade and exchange, deepening integration, and peaceful cooperation with its neighbors and the broader international community? Tehran should know that changes in its behavior would meet with changes in ours. But Iran should also know that the United States will defend its friends and its interests vigorously until the day that change comes.
A third challenge is finding a way to resolve long-standing conflicts, particularly that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Our administration has put the idea of democratic development at the center of our approach to this conflict, because we came to believe that the Israelis will not achieve the security they deserve in their Jewish state and the Palestinians will not achieve the better life they deserve in a state of their own until there is a Palestinian government capable of exercising its sovereign responsibilities, both to its citizens and to its neighbors. Ultimately, a Palestinian state must be created that can live side by side with Israel in peace and security. This state will be born not just through negotiations to resolve hard issues related to borders, refugees, and the status of Jerusalem but also through the difficult effort to build effective democratic institutions that can fight terrorism and extremism, enforce the rule of law, combat corruption, and create opportunities for the Palestinians to improve their lives. This confers responsibilities on both parties.
As the experience of the past several years has shown, there is a fundamental disagreement at the heart of Palestinian society -- between those who reject violence and recognize Israel's right to exist and those who do not. The Palestinian people must ultimately make a choice about which future they desire, and it is only democracy that gives them that choice and holds open the possibility of a peaceful way forward to resolve the existential question at the heart of their national life. The United States, Israel, other states in the region, and the international community must do everything in their power to support those Palestinians who would choose a future of peace and compromise. When the two-state solution is finally realized, it will be because of democracy, not despite it.
This is, indeed, a controversial view, and it speaks to one more challenge that must be resolved if democratic and modern states are to emerge in the broader Middle East: how to deal with nonstate groups whose commitment to democracy, nonviolence, and the rule of law is suspect. Because of the long history of authoritarianism in the region, many of the best-organized political parties are Islamist, and some of them have not renounced violence used in the service of political goals. What should be their role in the democratic process? Will they take power democratically only to subvert the very process that brought them victory? Are elections in the broader Middle East therefore dangerous?
These questions are not easy. When Hamas won elections in the Palestinian territories, it was widely seen as a failure of policy. But although this victory most certainly complicated affairs in the broader Middle East, in another way it helped to clarify matters. Hamas had significant power before those elections -- largely the power to destroy. After the elections, Hamas also had to face real accountability for its use of power for the first time. This has enabled the Palestinian people, and the international community, to hold Hamas to the same basic standards of responsibility to which all governments should be held. Through its continued unwillingness to behave like a responsible regime rather than a violent movement, Hamas has demonstrated that it is wholly incapable of governing.
Much attention has been focused on Gaza, which Hamas holds hostage to its incompetent and brutal policies. But in other places, the Palestinians have held Hamas accountable. In the West Bank city of Qalqilya, for instance, where Hamas was elected in 2004, frustrated and fed-up Palestinians voted it out of office in the next election. If there can be a legitimate, effective, and democratic alternative to Hamas (something that Fatah has not yet been), people will likely choose it. This would especially be true if the Palestinians could live a normal life within their own state.
The participation of armed groups in elections is problematic. But the lesson is not that there should not be elections. Rather, there should be standards, like the ones to which the international community has held Hamas after the fact: you can be a terrorist group or you can be a political party, but you cannot be both. As difficult as this problem is, it cannot be the case that people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us. Although we cannot know whether politics will ultimately deradicalize violent groups, we do know that excluding them from the political process grants them power without responsibility. This is yet another challenge that the leaders and the peoples of the broader Middle East must resolve as the region turns to democratic processes and institutions to resolve differences peacefully and without repression.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF IRAQ
Then, of course, there is Iraq, which is perhaps the toughest test of the proposition that democracy can overcome deep divisions and differences. Because Iraq is a microcosm of the region, with its layers of ethnic and sectarian diversity, the Iraqi people's struggle to build a democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein is shifting the landscape not just of Iraq but of the broader Middle East as well.
The cost of this war, in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagined. This story is still being written, and will be for many years to come. Sanctions and weapons inspections, prewar intelligence and diplomacy, troop levels and postwar planning -- these are all important issues that historians will analyze for decades. But the fundamental question that we can ask and debate now is, Was removing Saddam from power the right decision? I continue to believe that it was.
After we fought one war against Saddam and then remained in a formal state of hostilities with him for over a decade, our containment policy began to erode. The community of nations was losing its will to enforce containment, and Iraq's ruler was getting increasingly good at exploiting it through programs such as oil-for-food -- indeed, more than we knew at the time. The failure of containment was increasingly evident in the UN Security Council resolutions that were passed and then violated, in our regular clashes in the no-fly zones, and in President Bill Clinton's decision to launch air strikes in 1998 and then join with Congress to make "regime change" our government's official policy in Iraq. If Saddam was not a threat, why did the community of nations keep the Iraqi people under the most brutal sanctions in modern history? In fact, as the Iraq Survey Group showed, Saddam was ready and willing to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs as soon as international pressure had dissipated.
The United States did not overthrow Saddam to democratize the Middle East. It did so to remove a long-standing threat to international security. But the administration was conscious of the goal of democratization in the aftermath of liberation. We discussed the question of whether we should be satisfied with the end of Saddam's rule and the rise of another strongman to replace him. The answer was no, and it was thus avowedly U.S. policy from the outset to try to support the Iraqis in building a democratic Iraq. It is important to remember that we did not overthrow Adolf Hitler to bring democracy to Germany either. But the United States believed that only a democratic Germany could ultimately anchor a lasting peace in Europe.
The democratization of Iraq and the democratization of the Middle East were thus linked. So, too, was the war on terror linked to Iraq, because our goal after September 11 was to address the deeper malignancies of the Middle East, not just the symptoms of them. It is very hard to imagine how a more just and democratic Middle East could ever have emerged with Saddam still at the center of the region.
Our effort in Iraq has been extremely arduous. Iraq was a broken state and a broken society under Saddam. We have made mistakes. That is undeniable. The explosion to the surface of long-suppressed grievances has challenged fragile, young democratic institutions. But there is no other decent and peaceful way for the Iraqis to reconcile.
As Iraq emerges from its difficulties, the impact of its transformation is being felt in the rest of the region. Ultimately, the states of the Middle East need to reform. But they need to reform their relations, too. A strategic realignment is unfolding in the broader Middle East, separating those states that are responsible and accept that the time for violence under the rubric of "resistance" has passed and those that continue to fuel extremism, terrorism, and chaos. Support for moderate Palestinians and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for democratic leaders and citizens in Lebanon have focused the energies of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the states of the Persian Gulf. They must come to see that a democratic Iraq can be an ally in resisting extremism in the region. When they invited Iraq to join the ranks of the Gulf Cooperation Council-Plus-Two (Egypt and Jordan), they took an important step in that direction.
At the same time, these countries look to the United States to stay deeply involved in their troubled region and to counter and deter threats from Iran. The United States now has the weight of its effort very much in the center of the broader Middle East. Our long-term partnerships with Afghanistan and Iraq, to which we must remain deeply committed, our new relationships in Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf provide a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead of helping to bring about a better, more democratic, and more prosperous Middle East.
A UNIQUELY AMERICAN REALISM
Investing in strong and rising powers as stakeholders in the international order and supporting the democratic development of weak and poorly governed states -- these broad goals for U.S. foreign policy are certainly ambitious, and they raise an obvious question: Is the United States up to the challenge, or, as some fear and assert these days, is the United States a nation in decline?
We should be confident that the foundation of American power is and will remain strong -- for its source is the dynamism, vigor, and resilience of American society. The United States still possesses the unique ability to assimilate new citizens of every race, religion, and culture into the fabric of our national and economic life. The same values that lead to success in the United States also lead to success in the world: industriousness, innovation, entrepreneurialism. All of these positive habits, and more, are reinforced by our system of education, which leads the world in teaching children not what to think but how to think -- how to address problems critically and solve them creatively.
Indeed, one challenge to the national interest is to make certain that we can provide quality education to all, especially disadvantaged children. The American ideal is one of equal opportunity, not equal outcome. This is the glue that holds together our multiethnic democracy. If we ever stop believing that what matters is not where you came from but where you are going, we will most certainly lose confidence. And an unconfident America cannot lead. We will turn inward. We will see economic competition, foreign trade and investment, and the complicated world beyond our shores not as challenges to which our nation can rise but as threats that we should avoid. That is why access to education is a critical national security issue.
We should also be confident that the foundations of the United States' economic power are strong, and will remain so. Even amid financial turbulence and international crises, the U.S. economy has grown more and faster since 2001 than the economy of any other leading industrial nation. The United States remains unquestionably the engine of global economic growth. To remain so, we must find new, more reliable, and more environmentally friendly sources of energy. The industries of the future are in the high-tech fields (including in clean energy), which our nation has led for years and in which we remain on the global cutting edge. Other nations are indeed experiencing amazing and welcome economic growth, but the United States will likely account for the largest share of global GDP for decades to come.
Even in our government institutions of national security, the foundations of U.S. power are stronger than many assume. Despite our waging two wars and rising to defend ourselves in a new global confrontation, U.S. defense spending today as a percentage of GDP is still well below the average during the Cold War. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have indeed put an enormous strain on our military, and President Bush has proposed to Congress an expansion of our force by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines. The experience of recent years has tested our armed forces, but it has also prepared a new generation of military leaders for stabilization and counterinsurgency missions, of which we will likely face more. This experience has also reinforced the urgent need for a new kind of partnership between our military and civilian institutions. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the provincial reconstruction teams that we deploy in Afghanistan and Iraq are a model of civil-military cooperation for the future.
In these pages in 2000, I decried the role of the United States, in particular the U.S. military, in nation building. In 2008, it is absolutely clear that we will be involved in nation building for years to come. But it should not be the U.S. military that has to do it. Nor should it be a mission that we take up only after states fail. Rather, civilian institutions such as the new Civilian Response Corps must lead diplomats and development workers in a whole-of-government approach to our national security challenges. We must help weak and poorly functioning states strengthen and reform themselves and thereby prevent their failure in the first place. This will require the transformation and better integration of the United States' institutions of hard power and soft power -- a difficult task and one that our administration has begun. Since 2001, the president has requested and Congress has approved a nearly 54 percent increase in funding for our institutions of diplomacy and development. And this year, the president and I asked Congress to create 1,100 new positions for the State Department and 300 new positions for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Those who follow us must build on this foundation.
Perhaps of greater concern is not that the United States lacks the capacity for global leadership but that it lacks the will. We Americans engage in foreign policy because we have to, not because we want to, and this is a healthy disposition -- it is that of a republic, not an empire. There have been times in the past eight years when we have had to do new and difficult things -- things that, at times, have tested the resolve and the patience of the American people. Our actions have not always been popular, or even well understood. The exigencies of September 12 and beyond may now seem very far away. But the actions of the United States will for many, many years be driven by the knowledge that we are in an unfair fight: we need to be right one hundred percent of the time; the terrorists, only once. Yet I find that whatever differences we and our allies have had over the last eight years, they still want a confident and engaged United States, because there are few problems in the world that can be resolved without us. We need to recognize that, too.
Ultimately, however, what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination. It is this feature of the American character that most accounts for our unique role in the world, and it stems from the way that we think about our power and our values. The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States, because we do not really accept that our national interest and our universal ideals are at odds. For our nation, it has always been a matter of perspective. Even when our interests and ideals come into tension in the short run, we believe that in the long run they are indivisible.
This has freed America to imagine that the world can always be better -- not perfect, but better -- than others have consistently thought possible. America imagined that a democratic Germany might one day be the anchor of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. America believed that a democratic Japan might one day be a source of peace in an increasingly free and prosperous Asia. America kept faith with the people of the Baltics that they would be independent and thus brought the day when NATO held a summit in Riga, Latvia. To realize these and other ambitious goals that we have imagined, America has often preferred preponderances of power that favor our values over balances of power that do not. We have dealt with the world as it is, but we have never accepted that we are powerless to change the world. Indeed, we have shown that by marrying American power and American values, we could help friends and allies expand the boundaries of what most thought realistic at the time.
How to describe this disposition of ours? It is realism, of a sort. But it is more than that -- what I have called our uniquely American realism. This makes us an incredibly impatient nation. We live in the future, not the past. We do not linger over our own history. This has led our nation to make mistakes in the past, and we will surely make more in the future. Still, it is our impatience to improve less-than-ideal situations and to accelerate the pace of change that leads to our most enduring achievements, at home and abroad.
At the same time, ironically, our uniquely American realism also makes us deeply patient. We understand how long and trying the course of democracy is. We acknowledge our birth defect, a constitution founded on a compromise that reduced my ancestors each to three-fifths of a man. Yet we are healing old wounds and living as one American people, and this shapes our engagement with the world. We support democracy not because we think ourselves perfect but because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect. This gives us reason to be humble in our own endeavors and patient with the endeavors of others. We know that today's headlines are rarely the same as history's judgments.
An international order that reflects our values is the best guarantee of our enduring national interest, and America continues to have a unique opportunity to shape this outcome. Indeed, we already see glimpses of this better world. We see it in Kuwaiti women gaining the right to vote, in a provincial council meeting in Kirkuk, and in the improbable sight of the American president standing with democratically elected leaders in front of the flags of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the future state of Palestine. Shaping that world will be the work of a generation, but we have done such work before. And if we remain confident in the power of our values, we can succeed in such work again.
