EPS Bernard L. Schwartz Syposium:
The Economic and Security Future
Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
November 17, 2014
James Galbraith:
It is my great privilege now to introduce our second keynote speaker, whom we are very honored to have with us this morning. He is a distinguished citizen, public servant, a combat soldier, a former secretary of the Navy, and until recently, United States senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia. But to me there is something more than that, something which is particularly important, which is that Jim Webb is a man who has the structure of the English sentence in his bones. It’s a very rare thing in public life, and it reflects not only a command over language, but over thought. That’s why we invited him.
I was particularly taken by his new memoir. It chanced to cross my desk a few months ago. It’s very hard for someone of my age and background to form a different view than I had as a young man of the war in Viet Nam; but some of the passages of Jim Webb’s new book had that effect on me simply by the power and clarity of his description of events and of the political structure that underlay those events. I just want to say that we’re dealing here with someone of exceptional abilities, and I am deeply honored to be able to introduce him to you this morning. Senator Jim Webb.
Keynote
Senator Jim Webb:
Thank you very much, Dr. Galbraith, for that introduction, and also for the invitation for me to come and speak to you today.
I view this more as something of a conversation than a keynote. I actually was asked to be here by 11:15 so that I would be finished by noon, and I’ve got an early afternoon schedule that I’m going to have to meet; so I’m going to keep to a pretty tight timeline here.
I was asked to come and just talk about the state of our national security, the issues that face us today. And first I do so partially from the background that was already mentioned; but I think in terms of how our military is used and how our foreign policy is examined, I probably lived in almost every different piece of this world that any American can. I grew up in the military, my father was a pilot, served in World War II, then in the Berlin Airlift, later was a pioneer in missile programs. I served as a marine in Viet Nam. I’ve spent five years in the Pentagon, one as a marine and four as a defense executive. My son dropped out of college, enlisted in the Marine Corps, and saw hard combat in Ramadi, Iraq, which is a place a lot of people are talking about right now with the most recent uprisings problems, etc. I also was able to serve on the ground as a journalist in Beirut, when our marines were there in 1983, and then again in Afghanistan as an inbed in 2004 going to a number of different places over there. I think I’ve had—And also I should say I spent years on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee in the Senate.
If I were to look at where the challenges are today, the first thing I would have to point out is that our foreign policy and the determinations of how we use the military around the world have sort of been on autopilot since right after 9/11. We strongly need in this country a clear articulation of what our policies are that would bring about the use of forces in these different situations around the world.
And I see actually three different focal points where we’ve kind of lost our ability to do that over the past—actually since the end of the Cold War. The first is, at the end of the Cold War, we lost the ability to have a clearly defined universe in which we were articulating our foreign policy and the use of force and the potential use of force. I like to say that the greatest strategic victory of the United States really was how we went about winning the Cold War. Our military leadership, our political leadership was able to do this over a period of decades without having to have the larger scale confrontations that were on the table so many different times.
Up until the end of the Cold War, from the middle of Viet Nam, about 1969, when the Nixon Doctrine was enunciated, to the end of the Cold War, we operated on a pretty clearly understandable set of principles. They were called the Nixon Doctrine. President Nixon, Secretary of State Kissinger worked on these early in their administration, and they held up. And basically in summation was we will honor our treaty commitments; we will provide a nuclear umbrella so that we can work against proliferation of nuclear weapons and also give guarantees to our allies who do not go in that direction; and in terms of local conflicts the doctrine said that we would not get involved in local conflicts, in the inner dynamic of local conflicts other than we would assist governments that suited our national interests in arming themselves, training people, this sort of thing. That doctrine obviously gave way to the realities of the post-Cold War universe, where it became much more difficult to articulate who specifically was this other universe that we were in constant friction with.
The second reality that has affected our foreign policy is the manner in which we became involved in issues in the Middle East and the continuing manner in which we’re addressing those issues. And this actually, from my experience, goes back to 1987, when I was secretary of the Navy, and this was several years into the Iran-Iraq War. Hundreds of thousands of people were dying, soldiers were dying, Iran versus Iraq, Iraq versus Iran. I was in the Pentagon at that time, as I said. I used to meet with Secretary Weinberger just about every day, and he had a philosophy at that time looking at the Iran-Iraq War, saying, don't pick sides, this is the worst regime in the world versus the second worst regime in the world, and I don’t know which one is which.
Then we had, for a number of reasons, one of them being the revelations of Iran Contra, which caused a number of people in the region to assume wrongly that we had actually tilted toward Iran, we, through a series of events, tilted toward Iraq. At that time, ironically, Kuwait was the strongest ally of Iraq, and we decided to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and call them American oil tankers essentially as a provocation against Iran moving oil through the Strait of Hormuz. At that time some of you will remember Iraqi aircraft attacked a United States Navy ship in the Persian Gulf, the U.S.S. Star, killed 37 American sailors. And yet we ended up tilting toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. Within a few years after that, Iraq invaded Kuwait. We ended up in Gulf War I, etc., etc.
And we just have fallen into that Pandora’s Box of the Killer of Empires, as has been said on a number of occasions, in a way that I don’t think has been positive for our national security interests or our national wealth. We have strong national security interests in that part of the world, but they should not be addressed by our becoming an occupying power in that part of the world. This came to a head obviously with the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that I argued against strongly in a piece in The Washington Post six months before the invasion, saying basically—I think many people here were probably saying the same thing—you’re going to unleash sectarian violence, you’re going to empower Iran, and we’re going to stabilize the region, and we’re going to be in the middle of it. There was a phrase I used in an article saying that we went into Japan after World War II as an occupying power our soldiers became 50,000 friends. If we become an occupying power in Iraq, our soldiers are going to become 50,000 terrorist targets. And that is essentially what has happened. So the nature of how we define our involvement in that part of the world has changed, and it is going to have to re-change in terms of how we pursue our national security objectives.
The third difference that has concerned a lot of us, including me, has been the evolution of presidential authority in terms of defining when to use military force without consulting the Congress. There a couple of reasons for this. One of them is that the expression of our foreign policy has become something that is so complicated that it’s not properly debated in the Congress. And the second is we have in this area, with the ability of the president to unilaterally use military force, is the evolution of smarter weapons, special operations, small forces as in Libya, no so-called boots on the ground but you can still perform the sort of military attacks that clearly are an attack against another country. This is a dangerous concept in terms of how the United States addresses these issues around the world.
I spoke repeatedly on the Senate floor about how we went into Libya during that situation. It was not a civil war. The logic that we used to go in was different than any situation that I can remember in terms of the use of force by the president unilaterally. There were no treaties at risk, there were no Americans at risk, there were no imminent attacks that were going to come out of Libya. We hadn’t thought through the end result of doing this. Clearly, at a minimum, this is an issue that should have been brought to the Congress and debated, and we could not get a debate in the summer of 2012. We could not get a debate on the Senate floor. We could not get this issue brought to a vote. And the end result was, in the name of what was called humanitarian intervention—this was the new concept that was enunciated when we did this in Libya—we established a principle that the president can unilaterally decide what humanitarian conditions exist anywhere in the world in order to inject the United States military into it without coming to the Congress. This is not a healthy principle to allow to continue, which is one of the reasons why I think it’s a very smart move, finally, for the president to say he wants a vote on what he’s doing with ISIS in the Syria-Iraq area.
So our foreign policy in terms of how we use military force, particularly the decisions, has become very vague; and we need three answers. We need a doctrine, a clear doctrine, so that our fellow Americans can understand the logic under which we’re using force, so that our potential adversaries can understand, and so that our allies also understand and adjust. What are these conditions that should bring the use of American force around the world? What do we stand for? What are the lines that clearly are crossed in a general way so people can understand when these decisions are made?
The second is, I think we need to get a lot smarter about how we use the American military on the ground in that particular part of the world.
And thirdly, we really need to come to grips with the notion of the unilateral power of a president, of any president, when they decide to use force.
So those are, in a nutshell, about as quickly as I can give it, the issues that I think concern us. And I’d be happy to take a couple of questions.
Q:
Michael Lind with the New America Foundation. You mentioned the difficulty of explaining a complex policy to Congress, much less the public, and I’d like you to elaborate on that thought which you mentioned in passing. I’ll give you particular example: Among foreign policy experts, the chief concern about an Iranian nuclear bomb is that it will start a regional arms race with other countries in the region getting nuclear weapons. This is never explained by any politician of either party to the United States; instead you have a completely different threat that the Iranians will blow up Washington or New York or Tulsa. And thinking back to the struggle with the Soviets, with the Germans, the elite threat that was identified was the same one that they identified to the public. They might have simplified somewhat. In this case, and maybe there are some others, the story that is told to the public of what the threat is is quite different from what the foreign policy establishment really thinks.
Jim Webb:
I think that’s a very accurate description of what’s going on. And actually I would back it up, and that is, back up a little bit of history to start talking about this; and that is that there are times when an administration will not clearly explain things that are going on before you reach the crisis point. And maybe the best example of that in recent history is how Pakistan became a nuclear power, because they were aided very significantly by China. And when this was discovered at that time, the administration at that time just basically said that, oh, that was Chinese companies; it wasn’t really the Chinese government. And this was clearly a period in history where no Chinese company was going to be enabling Pakistan to have nuclear capability without the full and complete knowledge of the Chinese government.
So there are times when administrations sort of slip and slide because they don’t want to confront another power, in the case of Pakistan and China. And with respect to Iran, what you’re saying now, I want to talk a little bit about educating—not educating, but the difficulty of having the discussion itself. But with respect to Iran, I think that because the way that it is articulated is so dramatic, it’s very difficult for an administration, as this administration is doing, to engage in meaningful dialogue with Iran without becoming criticized for potentially enabling them to become a nuclear threat, a nuclear power. There have been a lot of changes in Iran over the last 10 years. I’m not saying that we should completely trust them, but we certainly should be having that discussion.
The difficulty with respect to the Congress that I was mentioning is that these issues become so complex that it’s difficult for many people who have been elected in areas, for reasons that are other than foreign policy reasons, to go through this kind of a drill. You need clear talking point types of advice that are given to members of Congress so they don’t go out and make a mistake publicly, or whatever. So it simplifies the debate, or in the case of a lot of things that have been happening in the Middle East, it just makes the debate so it’s not going to happen. You have on the Republican sides highly activist senators like John McCain, who push very hard to get one set of goals accomplished, and the tendency among the Democrats, particularly for the last six years, has been to just defer to the administration so that they won’t have to enter into the very very complicated debates and be misunderstood. Is that clear enough?
Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off before.
Q:
Nice to see you again, Senator.
Jim Webb:
Thank you.
Q:
I’m Mitzy Wertheimer. I’m now with the Naval Postgraduate School. I’m working with a group of people who are starting to try to figure out what needs to be the education and training we’re giving for our military officers. And in this complicated world where we don’t have a doctrine, it’s really hard. What recommendations would you make, and are you willing to talk about it after this, because it’s very—Not this minute, but sometime later.
Jim Webb:
I think that obviously the education of military officers is—it’s a career-long process, and I think, first of all, the quality of the people who are coming into the military right now in terms of their basic educational background is very very good.
The first objective of training a military officer is making sure that that person can do the basic call of duty jobs once they’re commissioned. For instance, when I went through the Naval Academy during the height of the Viet Nam War, we had discussions in classrooms about the politics of the war, but the main thing that we were being trained to do was to lead young Americans in that operational environment.
Beyond that actually I see the educational parts of career military people to be exceptionally good right time, and a lot of attention being paid to it. The difficulties or the worries that I have are more toward how we in a leadership environment are going to have the discussion where we could clarify our foreign policy and the reasons that we use military power. You want your mid-level military officers to have an understanding of that; but you want the people, non-military and military, at the top to be able to have that discussion and an administration to have a clear articulation.
Q:
[…?]
Jim Webb:
The question was, do I think the context of how these countries are? [sic] Clearly, clearly. I think that’s something the public needs to understand as well. And the downside of the wrong choices when it comes to the use of military force. I mean, there’s a lot of history to understanding that as well.
Q:
Senator, thank you for being here. The president was just over in Burma, and I recall that a number of years before the administration talked about a pivot toward Asia, you were already pushing for such a pivot and helped open up the relations with the Burmese government. What was driving you to see the need to refocus on Asia? What did you see that caused you concern that we needed to pay a lot more attention to that part of the world.
Jim Webb:
I spent a lot of time in Asia over my life, wearing many different hats, including that of a journalist. I have always believed strongly through my entire adult life that we have to get Asia right, that that’s our strongest national security interest. You go to the Strait of Malacca just outside Singapore. Seventy thousand ships go through the Strait of Malacca every year, 200 an hour if you think about that, 200 ships an hour go through the Strait of Malacca into East Asia, out of East Asia, all the great ports, an enormous amount of commerce that fuels the world, one-third of all the oil tankers in the world go through the Strait of Malacca and in the Southeast Asian base and all the way up into Korea, China, Japan, etc. It’s a vital, vital area for us to articulate our strategic interests in and to maintain the stability. We have been the great stabilizing factor in East Asia since the end of World War II.
When I came to the Senate, I said from our office, we are going to reinvigorate those relationships, which had kind of fallen by the wayside with all of the activities in treasure and blood that had gone into Iraq and Afghanistan. And I said, we’re going to work on reinvigorating our relations with Japan, Korea, the countries of [?], but particularly Viet Nam, Thailand, Singapore, and change the formula in Burma. And at that time Burma was a pariah state; we weren’t even talking to them at all. I had been there as a civilian, I’d made a pretty extensive visit here well before I was elected to the Senate. I could see that there was a way that we could open up Burma, and that it was clearly in our national interest to do so given its geographical position and the danger that it was becoming a client state of China. So we worked from the time I came into the Senate, and in ’09 we worked through an entire year, seven months, to arrange a trip into Burma. We did it through validators, people that I knew, some were Burmese, some were Americans who had been business people in Burma; and in August of ’09 we led the first delegation into Burma by an American leader for ten years. I met with [?], the only American ever who was allowed to meet with [?], who was the leader the military junta. We talked to them during that trip about how it should be in their interest to open up. And we had continuous conversations from that point forward until I left the Senate. Actually I was back there last year, visiting and talking to them.
So that region has undergone so much change in the last 40 years, and it is vital for us to get that part of the world right in a strategic sense, and I thank you for the question.
Thank you very much for being with me today. Thank you. |