The Sources of American Legitimacy

Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004

Summary:  The 18 months since the launch of the Iraq war have left the country's hard-earned respect and credibility in tatters. In going to war without a legal basis or the backing of traditional U.S. allies, the Bush administration brazenly undermined Washington's long-held commitment to international law, its acceptance of consensual decision-making, its reputation for moderation, and its identification with the preservation of peace. The road back will be a long and hard one.

Robert W. Tucker is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. David C. Hendrickson is Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College.

Taken alone, any one of these doctrines might have seemed an understandable, albeit regrettable, reaction to the trauma induced by September 11. But together they struck the United States' traditional allies, and much of the world, with terror. The United States was showing a face that appeared radically opposed to the ideas and principles for which Washington had once stood. All four of the pillars that supported U.S. legitimacy in the post-World War II era-its commitment to international law, its acceptance of consensual decision-making, its reputation for moderation, and its identification with the preservation of peace-were now in question.

The neoconservatives responsible for this startling loss of U.S. legitimacy have defended themselves by pointing to various precedents in which the United States engaged in illegal or unilateral conduct. But although certain aspects of the Bush doctrine were presaged by earlier administrations, no preceding administration brought all of these elements together in so alarming a way. Ronald Reagan proclaimed the right in theory to overthrow undemocratic regimes, but in practice was hobbled by a resistant Congress and was himself unwilling to commit U.S. forces for this object. George H.W. Bush declared in the aftermath of the Gulf War that he possessed the authority to go to war without the authorization of the UN Security Council or Congress, but he had still sought and received approval from both institutions. Bill Clinton embraced regime change in Iraq but was unwilling to fight a major war for it, preferring the more modest (and ineffectual) strategy of supporting a military coup against Saddam Hussein. Clinton also did not rule out in theory a doctrine of preventive war to forestall the acquisition by "rogue states" of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but in practice he did not fight one. The precipitous collapse of support for U.S. aims under George W. Bush demonstrates that the nation's allies, indeed most of the world, believe that something fundamental in the U.S. global posture has changed-for the worse.

Undoubtedly, U.S. legitimacy did undergo a dramatic transformation with the end of the Cold War. U.S. legitimacy did not collapse "along with the Berlin Wall and Lenin's statues," as Kagan argues, but it became problematic in a way it had not been previously. Having built up a prodigious military machine in the course of its rivalry with the Soviet Union, the United States now found itself without a military equal and in a position, from a narrow military standpoint, to act without the serious prospect of external restraint. This advantage created a potentially dangerous situation, one that, from the standpoint of traditional American political thought, required correction. Whether in international or domestic affairs, it has been almost a first law of U.S. statecraft that any situation of unbounded power heralds an incipient condition of political pathology. Since the post-Cold War world continued to hold many dangers, it was easy to make the case that the international order required a guardian, but it was equally evident that the guardian's power needed to be restrained, whether internally or externally. The end of the Cold War thus thrust the United States and the world into a Madisonian moment. "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men," James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

This consideration goes a long way toward explaining the renewed emphasis on U.S. cooperation with the UN that occurred during the Gulf War, when the international body, as George H.W. Bush emphasized, stood poised to fulfill the mission foreseen by its founders. It also explains the emphasis, both before and after the end of the Cold War, that the United States placed on maintaining a global concert of the advanced industrialized democracies. Neither George H.W. Bush nor Bill Clinton allowed the Security Council to constrain U.S. policy in all instances, but they were keenly aware of the importance of respecting the international body's opinions. It is part of the pathology of U.S. power today that the evident need for a constitutional check on the world's most powerful state-a constraint the United States would welcome if it were true to its political heritage-is now seen to stem from spiteful anti-Americanism.

It cannot be said, to be sure, that the Bush White House has been oblivious to the need for securing international legitimacy. By styling its doctrine of preventive war the "strategy of preemption," it sought to approximate its strategy to one of self-defense-for preemption, if the threat is imminent, can at least make a tolerable claim to legitimacy. This approach would have been unconvincing even if banned weapons had been found in Iraq-possessing weapons is not proof of impending attack-but it utterly collapsed when no weapons were discovered. Advocates for war then argued that the administration had never actually said that the threat was imminent, only that it was "grave and growing." Absent a showing of imminence, however, one could not make a plausible claim for the lawfulness of the action. In truth, the Bush administration did not care a fig for whether the war was lawful. It wanted its strategy of preventive war to seem lawful, but the doctrine's implementation never depended on whether the administration's lawyers could write a coherent brief in its favor.

Bush's acceptance of Secretary of State Colin Powell's argument-that Washington would be wise to seek authorization for intervention from the UN Security Council-was another sign that at least some in the administration saw the need to secure legitimacy. There followed the six-month phony war at the UN, when the administration claimed that it was taking the last step for peace, that it expected a peaceful resolution if Saddam were willing to cooperate, and that no decision for war had been taken-all of which was untrue. Throughout the crisis, it was apparent that the decision of the Security Council was perfectly irrelevant to the question of whether the United States would go to war-despite the fact that Washington's rationale for going to war relied in part on Security Council resolutions that the United States proposed, illegally, to enforce itself.

Evidently, the administration regarded the UN in an entirely instrumental light. If it were useful in securing wider support for the contemplated action, the Bush White House was not averse to working through it. But when it became clear that support would not be forthcoming, notice was served that the U.S. commitment to multilateralism was at an end. Said one State Department official in March 2003, "We will want to make sure that the United States never gets caught again in a diplomatic choke point in the Security Council or in NATO." In recognition of the importance that consensual decision-making had played in shoring up U.S. legitimacy in the past, the administration invoked a "coalition of the willing" and went so far as to claim that the real unilateralists were those who opposed its policy. Unfortunately, these "unilateralists" happened to include overwhelming majorities throughout the world, even in most of the countries that were brought into the coalition.

Indeed, it was clear that the Bush doctrine was severely wanting in all four of the elements that had sustained U.S. legitimacy in the past. Washington had acted illegally in going to war against Iraq, and events following the end of major combat operations (the absence of WMD, the growing anarchy) served to weaken rather than strengthen its case. It had gone far beyond the parameters of the 1990s debate over whether the United States should give the nod to the UN or to NATO, evidently deciding that it could dispense with both. It had confirmed the observation of Alexander Hamilton that the "spirit of moderation in a state of overbearing power is a phenomenon which has not yet appeared, and which no wise man will expect ever to see." And it had demonstrated by its every action that it had no plan to secure the peace. Peace was the furthest thing from the administration's agenda. As Edmund Burke said of the French revolutionaries, Bush's policy was "military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements."

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE