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Catalysing Events, Think Tanks and American Foreign Policy Shifts: A Comparative Analysis of the Impacts of Pearl Harbor 1941 and 11 September 2001

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Inderjeet Parmar
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Abstract

The American aggression in Iraq and the campaign in Afghanistan resulted from the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. 9/11 has had a massive, catalysing effect on the American public, press, main political parties and official foreign policy makers. This article assesses the impact of 9/11 in changing US foreign policy and especially in creating a new foreign policy establishment by comparing it to the consequences of an historical military attack on the United States – Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. It concludes that there is adequate evidence to suggest that a new bipartisan foreign policy consensus/establishment has emerged.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , 2005 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005.

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References

1 Julie Kosterlitz, ‘The Neo-Conservative Moment’, National Journal, 17 May 2003. According to Kosterlitz, who has followed the development of the neo-conservative movement in some detail, 9/11 was the catalyst for turning a collection of speeches, articles and ideas ‘into a fully articulated national doctrine’; p. 1541.

2 Neo-conservative is a term used for ex-liberal or ex-Marxist (usually Trotskyist) converts to radical conservatism; they are often Jewish or Catholic, and strongly favour close US–Israeli relations.

3 Comments made by Michael Cox at a Round Table on US Foreign Policy, British Association for American Studies conference, Aberystwyth, April 2003. For the case of the 1970s, see Joseph G. Peschek, Policy Planning Organizations. Elite Agendas and America's Rightward Turn, Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 1987.

4 Cox, Michael, ‘American Power Before and After 11 September: Dizzy with Success?’, International Affairs, 78: 2 (2002), pp. 261–6.Google Scholar A notable exception is provided by Sherle R. Schwenninger, ‘Revamping American Grand Strategy’, World Policy Journal (Fall 2003), pp. 26–44, in which the author suggests, without further elaboration or development, that the Bush Doctrine ‘has won the acceptance of neo-liberal hawks associated with the Democratic Party …’, p. 25.

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6 Cited in ibid., p. 52. For further elaboration of Haass's views on the changing priorities of the Bush administration, see Nicholas Lemann, ‘How it Came to War: When Did Bush Decide that he Had to Fight Saddam?’, The New Yorker, 28 March 2003.

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10 Ikenberry, ‘America's Imperial Ambition’, op. cit., p. 46.

11 Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace? Chairmen's Report of an Independent Task Force, New York, CFR/Asia Society, 2003.

12 James Dobbins et al., America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA, RAND, 2003, p. xxix.

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14 It remains to be seen if US public opinion and, even more, the nerve of the Bush administration will hold on this issue, given the mounting casualties among American military forces in Iraq, although public opinion will probably only enter the equation should splits appear within the domestic elite pro-war coalition.

15 Richard Haass noted in a press release: ‘In the 1990s it became fashionable to think and talk about “exit strategies”. There can be no exit strategy in the war against terrorism. It is a war that will persist. There is unlikely to be a decisive battle in this war. An exit strategy, therefore, will do us no good. What we need is an endurance strategy’, Department of State Press Release, 13 September 2002.

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20 On the other hand, at 39 per cent, John Kerry's rating as a strong leader fell far short of Bush’s.

21 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll results, 6 September 2004.

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23 50 per cent of those polled supported Bush while 44 per cent supported Kerry; Gallup poll, 4 February 2004.

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26 Lemann, ‘How it Came to War’, op. cit.

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31 Michael C. Desch, ‘Liberals, Neocons, and Realcons’, Orbis, 45: 4 (Fall 2001), pp. 519–31.

32 Indeed, as is argued later in this article, many neo-cons actively embrace the idea of a new American-led global imperialism, a democratic imperialism for promoting democracy and human rights. For the realist element in liberal, including neo-con, thought in foreign affairs, see John Mearsheimer, ‘Liberal Talk, Realist Thinking’, University of Chicago Magazine, www.magazine.uchicago.edu/0202/features/index.htm; February 2002.

33 Martin Durham, ‘The American Right and the Iraq War’, unpublished paper in the author's possession presented at the American Politics Group Conference, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, January 2004.

34 Irving Kristol, ‘The Neoconservative Persuasion’, Weekly Standard, 25 August 2003.

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40 Brian Whitaker, ‘US Thinktanks Give Lessons in Foreign Policy’, Guardian Unlimited, 19 August 2002.

41 Ibid.

42 Letter, PNAC to Clinton, 26 January 1998; in http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm. The letter was signed inter alia by Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, R. James Woolsey and William J. Bennett.

43 Michael Lind, ‘The Weird Men behind George W Bush's War’, New Statesman, 7 April 2003, p. 12.

44 Julie Kosterlitz, ‘Empire Strikes Back’, National Journal, 14 December 2002. Kosterlitz characterizes the difference between the conservative-realists and neo-cons thus: the former think the US should ‘speak softly, carry a big stick, but leave a small footprint’, while the latter think they should ‘speak often, carry the biggest stick, and keep a world atlas handy’; p. 3644.

45 Kosterlitz, ‘The Neo-Conservative Moment’, op. cit., p. 1542.

46 PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, op. cit., p. 51.

47 Jim Lobe, ‘The War on Dissent Widens’, Foreign Policy in Focus, Global Affairs Commentary, 15 March 2002; at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0203avot_body.html.

48 Perle is a member, and former chairman, of the Defense Policy Board, an independent advisory group at the Department of Defense; John Bolton is undersecretary for arms control and international security; Rubin is an adviser on Iran and Iraq in Special Plans at the Pentagon.

49 George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep, New York, William Morrow and Co., 1999, pp. 129–30. Bush noted, in 1999, a year before the PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses, that ‘The status quo is powerful, especially when juxtaposed with fear of the unknown.’ He also believed that Texans and, by extension, Americans, valued ‘bold leadership’, and as leader of the ‘the world's only remaining superpower’ in ‘a world of terror and missiles and madmen’, he was the man for the job.

50 Rice was formerly associated with the anti-communist Hoover Institution War, Revolution and Peace; see, Paul van Slambrouck, ‘California Think Tank Acts as Bush “Brain Trust” ’, Christian Science Monitor, 2 July 1999. For further criticism of the idea of a neo-con takeover of the Bush administration, see Max Boot, ‘Neocons’, Foreign Policy, (January/February 2004), pp. 20–8.

51 Ronald W. Cox, ‘The Military-Industrial Complex and U.S. Foreign Policy: Institutionalizing the New Right Agenda in the Post-Cold War Period’, in A. E. Ansell (ed.), Unraveling the Right, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1998, pp. 199–200.

52 Chace, James, ‘Quixotic America’, World Policy Journal, 20: 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 7–15.Google Scholar The shift in Condoleeza Rice's foreign policy thinking, from traditional realist to a more Wilsonian one, demonstrates the difficulty in drawing hard and fast lines between neo-cons and conservative-realists; ibid., pp. 8–9. Max Boot also shows that many conservative-realists (he calls them ‘national-interest conservatives’), such as Condoleeza Rice, became more favourably disposed to neo-con ideas after 9/11; Boot, ‘Neocons’, op. cit., p. 21.

53 Lobe, ‘The War on Dissent Widens’, op. cit.

54 Http://www.avot.org/stories/storyReader$11.

55 Http://www.avot.org/stories/story$141.

56 Whitaker, ‘US Thinktanks Give Lessons’, op. cit.

57 Ibid.

58 Lobe, ‘The War on Dissent Widens’, op. cit.

59 Thompson, John A., ‘Another Look at the Downfall of ‘Fortress America’, Journal of American Studies, 26: 3 (1992), pp. 393–408.Google Scholar

60 Ibid., p. 394.

61 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, New York, Oxford University Press, 1987.

62 Richard J. Barnett, Roots of War. The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy, Baltimore, Penguin, 1972, especially pp. 23–47.

63 Robert A. Divine, Second Chance. The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II, New York, Atheneum, 1967.

64 Thompson, ‘Another Look’, op. cit.

65 L. Shoup and W. Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1977.

66 Ikenberry, ‘America's Imperial Ambition’, op. cit.

67 Godfrey Hodgson, ‘The Establishment’, Foreign Policy, 9 (1972–3), pp. 3–40. See also, Barnett, Roots of War, op. cit.

68 Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, op. cit.; Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984; Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1994; Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy. A Comparative Study of the Role of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Parmar, Inderjeet, ‘The Issue of State Power: Case Study of the CFR’, Journal of American Studies, 29: 1 (1995), pp. 73–95 Google Scholar; Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Mobilizing America for an Internationalist Foreign Policy’, Studies in American Political Development, 13 (Fall 1999), pp. 337–73; Inderjeet Parmar, ‘The Carnegie Corporation and the Mobilisation of American Public Opinion During the United States' Rise to Globalism’, Minerva, 37 (1999), pp. 355–78; Inderjeet Parmar, ‘“To Relate Knowledge and Action…”: The Rockefeller Foundation's Impact on Foreign Policy Thinking During America's Rise to Globalism’, Minerva, 40 (2002).

69 Ibid., pp. 235–63.

70 Parmar, ‘Mobilizing America’, op. cit.; Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations, op. cit.

71 Nathaniel Peffer, ‘Memorandum on Carnegie Grants in the Field of International Relations’, 17 April 1942, in Carnegie Corporation Grant Files, Box 187: International Relations; Butler Library, Columbia University.

72 Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, op. cit.

73 Ibid., p. 136.

74 See Divine, Second Chance, op. cit.; Thompson, ‘Another Look’, op. cit.

75 Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy, op. cit.

76 Divine, Second Chance, op. cit.

77 This was Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg's advice to President Truman in order to convince the US public of the necessity of a foreign policy of Soviet ‘containment’; see M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism. Combatting the Enemy Within, 1830–1970, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

78 Laurie Mylroie, ‘Senate Unanimously Passes Iraq Liberation Act’, Iraq News, 9 October 1998; at http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/10/981009-in.htm. Richard Haass also suggests that by the 2000 presidential elections, Clinton, Gore and Bush agreed on Iraqi ‘regime change’ although not on the means of achieving it; Lemann, ‘How it Came to War’, op. cit.

79 US Senator Trent Lott, quoted in Mylroie, ‘Senate Unanimously Passes Iraq Liberation Act’, op. cit.

80 US Senator Jesse Helms, quoted in ibid.

81 White House Press Release, Statement by the President, ‘The Iraq Liberation Act’, 31 October 1998.

82 ‘If I Were President’, Foreign Policy, (March/April 2003), pp. 50–61. See also numerous issues of Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report from late 2002.

83 Lobe, ‘The War on Dissent Widens’, op. cit.

84 ‘Joe Lieberman – Irony and Hypocrisy’, Mid-East Realities, 8 October 2000; at http://www.MiddleEast.Org.

85 ‘If I Were President’, op. cit., p. 50. See also Shafer and Claggett, The Two Majorities, op. cit., on the tradition of Republican prevalence in nationalism/foreign affairs.

86 ‘If I Were President’, op. cit., pp. 60–1.

87 Lemann, ‘How it Came to War’, op. cit.

88 Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 8 February 2003, p. 358.

89 Ibid., p. 360.

90 Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 22 March 2003, pp. 683–4.

91 ‘Politics: A Kerry Top 10’, National Journal, 30 January 2004.

92 Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 22 March 2003, p. 684.

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97 Ibid.

98 Parmar, Inderjeet, ‘Resurgent Academic Interest in the CFR’, Politics, 21: 1 (2001), pp. 31–9.Google Scholar

99 Lemann, ‘How it Came to War’, op. cit.

100 Boot, cited in Kosterlitz, ‘Empire Strikes Back’, op. cit, p. 3641.

101 Ibid., p. 3643.

102 Stanley Kurtz, ‘Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint’, Policy Review (April–May 2003); http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/.

103 Cited in Kosterlitz, ‘Empire Strikes Back’, op. cit., p. 3645.

104 Andrew Sullivan, ‘Hitler? He's not Half as Bad as Bush’, Sunday Times New Review, 6 April 2003.

105 Christopher Hitchens, Regime Change, London, Penguin, 2003, p. 4.

106 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

107 Ibid., p. 19.

108 ‘A Kerry Top 10’, op. cit.

109 Roland Watson, ‘Democrat Accuses Bush of Deception on War’, The Times, 20 June 2003.

110 Ikenberry, ‘America's Imperial Ambition’, op. cit., p. 45.

111 Jack Snyder, ‘Imperial Temptations’, The National Interest (Spring 2003), p. 39.