MULTILATERAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE USE OF FORCE:

A REASSESSMENT

Seyom Brown

March 2006

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Given the controversial nature of the inquiry, the author is particularly grateful to 

the following authorities on transatlantic relations for sharing, in candid discussions, 

their insights on many of the issues raised here: Benoit d’Aboville, Gunther Altenburg, 

Ronald D. Asmus, Owen R. Cote, Robert E. Hunter, John M. Koenig, Norman W. Ray, 

Benjamin Schreer, Simon Serfaty, Walther Stuetzle, and Hans W. Wiermann. The 

author also thanks the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College for 

their support of this project. The findings and recommendations in this monograph, 

however, should not be taken to represent the views of any of the individuals mentioned 

here or of the U.S. Army War College.

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iii

FOREWORD

This inquiry has been conducted in the midst of increasing questioning 

by policymakers and scholars concerning the importance and role of 

alliances and other multilateral arrangements and legal norms affecting 

the use of force by the United States. Provoked in part by the transatlantic 

altercations surrounding Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, the questioning 

is driven by systemic developments—changes in the structure of world 

politics and changes in the shape of war—of which the Iraq-focused 

disputes were a symptom. 

Together, the systemic political and military developments portend an 

era of decreased U.S. deference to and reliance on established multilateral 

institutions (especially the United Nations [UN] and the North Atlantic 

Treaty Organization [NATO]), and a decreased willingness to be bound by 

international treaties that can constrain U.S. flexibility in the development 

and application of military power. Yet an emulation by other countries of 

this trend in U.S. policy can undermine basic U.S. interests in moderating 

international anarchy, arresting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, 

and concerting international responses to terrorism. 

Although much of the controversy over the extent to which U.S. security 

policy ought to be constrained by multilateralism revolves around the role 

of the UN, the focus of this monograph is on the future of NATO. Ironically, 

the difficulty of achieving a multilateral consensus in the Alliance can 

create more of a crisis than does the difficulty of generating an effective UN 

response to threats to international peace and security. NATO, after all, 

was supposed to be America’s prime multilateral institution for obtaining 

legitimation and support of military action when the UN Security Council 

was paralyzed because of the veto. But as it has turned out, especially with 

the enlargement of NATO’s membership, the ability of Washington to 

obtain a Brussels imprimatur for U.S-led multilateral military operations, 

let alone for its unilateral military actions, has become almost as hard as 

(and in some cases even harder than) obtaining UN endorsement. And 

whereas proposals to change the UN Security Council’s voting rules have 

become a matter for open discourse among statespersons, such discourse 

with respect to the North Atlantic Council is shied away from as subversive 

of the ethos of the Alliance. 

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

SEYOM BROWN is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International 

Cooperation at Brandeis University. He has held senior research and 

policy analysis positions at the RAND Corporation, the Brookings 

Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

His books include The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 

21st Century; New Forces, Old Forces, and the Future of World Politics; 

and The Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign 

Policy from Truman to Clinton. Dr. Brown received his B.A. and M.A. 

from the University of Southern California and his Ph.D. from the 

University of Chicago.
SUMMARY

The Need for Reassessment.

The constraints on the use of force that the United States must 

accept when it participates in military operations under the aegis 

of an increasingly heterogeneous NATO call for a reassessment 

of the role that NATO plays in U.S. national security policy. This 

reassessment addresses the issue of whether the constraints on the 

U.S. use of force embodied in NATO’s mode of operation are worth 

the benefits derived from them. 

The Variety of Multilateral Options.

The multilateral modalities that have evolved in NATO are only 

a subset of the wide range of multilateral arrangements that could 

be suitable for the transatlantic community. An examination of these 

indicates that there may be alternatives to the current design of 

NATO that could retain the benefits of transatlantic multilateralism, 

while minimizing the constraints on U.S. military flexibility and 

effectiveness.

The Benefits and Costs of Multilateralism.

This reevaluation of NATO’s evolved structure and functioning 

is embedded in an appreciation of the standard benefits and costs of 

multilateral security commitments. The benefits include international 

and domestic legitimacy for U.S. military actions; influence over the 

actions of other countries and political movements; wartime and 

postwar burdensharing; easier access to the battlefield; and access 

to more intelligence. The costs include giving others, who may not 

share U.S. priorities or strategic calculations, a share in political 

authority and/or command over U.S. military operations; delays 

in undertaking actions that may be time-urgent; loss of secrecy; the 

politicizing of intrawar strategies and the distortion of war aims; and 

the complication of postwar reconstruction and stabilization tasks.
vi

How the Changing International System Affects the Feasibility 

and Desirability of Working Through NATO.

If the international system were truly as “unipolar” as some 

analysts contend, members of NATO, as during the Cold War, 

would look to the United States as an essential provider of the world 

public goods of international peace and security. They therefore 

would be ready to cooperate in, or at least countenance, any military 

operation Washington decided was important (the “bandwagoning” 

effect), and would be unlikely to try to put barriers in its way. But 

such unipolarity is proving to be an illusion. Nor does the classical 

concept of “multipolarity”—in which other great powers coalesce 

to “balance” the power of the system’s hegemon—adequately 

comprehend what is going on. 

Rather, the widespread balking at U.S. claims to automatic 

leadership of the transatlantic community is symptomatic of the 

emergence of global polyarchy—a system of increasingly diverse 

alignment and adversary relationships in which, typically, a country’s 

partner in one field may be its rival in another field, today’s friend 

may be tomorrow’s enemy, and vice versa. The opposition of France 

and Germany to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and Turkey’s refusal 

to allow U.S. invading troops to transit its territory were consistent 

with the emergent polyarchy, as are the persisting efforts of European 

Union (EU) members of NATO to institute arrangements (e.g., the 

“Berlin Plus” agreements) facilitating “autonomous” military action 

by the Europeans in which they use some of NATO’s assets. Given 

this systemic reality, the United States will find it progressively less 

feasible and desirable to conduct major security operations under the 

aegis of NATO as it is currently structured and normally functions. 

The Impact of Military Transformation.

Much of what is included under the rubric of “transformation”—

or, more ambitiously, the revolution in military affairs (RMA)—

points toward a military posture that is increasingly allianceinsensitive. The contemplated transformation of U.S. capabilities 

and strategy is in the direction of less dependence on forward long-
vii

term stationing of forces abroad and more on being able to get into 

zones of combat quickly, whether or not allies are around to support 

the required military operations. Coupled with the “Global Posture 

Review” announcements of planned realignment and redeployment 

of U.S. forces based overseas and the search for “a diverse array 

of smaller cooperative security locations for contingency access,” 

transformation looks more and more (from both sides of the Atlantic) 

like preparation for a world in which the United States will be able to 

apply its military power with very few allies or even without allies 

when necessary. 

The technologies that allow for greater interoperability among 

the military forces of allies are also conducive to modular separability

arrangements (as contemplated in “Berlin Plus”), such that members 

of a coalition physically can opt out of a NATO operation or conduct 

their own operation without compromising the whole NATO 

apparatus. 

Toward a Modular Multilateralism.

The systemic political developments and the innovations in 

military technology that are challenging the viability of NATO 

can be regarded either as a threat to transatlantic security or as an 

opportunity to adapt NATO to the changing benefits and costs of 

multilateralism in the polyarchic world. To retain the benefits of 

multilateralism while reducing the costs to U.S. military flexibility 

and effectiveness, the United States should:

• Recognize—in both declaratory policy and actions—that 

NATO has evolved into a coalition of coalitions and a much 

looser association of member states than originally assumed 

in the Washington Treaty.

• Legitimize and elaborate modular structures, decision 

processes, and operational routines.

• Promote the use of the North Atlantic Council as a consultative 

institution and discourage its role as director of NATO 

military actions.
viii

• Prevent Council decisions that “pass the buck” to the SACEUR 

or subordinate NATO agencies in the form of vague mandates 

for conducting military operations.

• Endorse devolutions of authority and considerable operational 

autonomy on a case-by-case basis to modular subcoalitions 

that have the capability and the will to respond to particular 

threats to peace and security.

• Insist (and ensure through advance planning) that when the 

United States participates in a multilateral NATO action, the 

actual conduct of operations is by those modular units that 

can operate with sufficient unity of command and control—

minus debilitating national caveats—to efficiently achieve 

U.S. military and political objectives. 
MULTILATERAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE USE OF FORCE:

A REASSESSMENT

It’s kind of like having a basketball team, and they practice and practice 

for six months. When it comes to game time, one or two say, “We’re not 

going to play.” Well, that’s fair enough. Everyone has a free choice. But 

you don’t have a free choice if you’ve practiced for all those months. So 

we’re going to have to find a way to manage our way through that.

—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Nice, France,

February 9, 2005

NATO should have a stronger relationship with the European Union. 

The truth is that this relationship is, at present, rather tied up in political 

Gordian knots.

—NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,

September 20, 2005

INTRODUCTION 

This is a time of fundamental questioning and debate in the 

transatlantic community about the functioning of the North Atlantic 

Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance and other multilateral security 

arrangements. The controversies have included the following 

issues.

Deference to the United Nations. 

Should members of the transatlantic community, whenever time 

allows, always first seek United Nations (UN) Security Council 

authorization (or at least give it the right of “first refusal”) for the 

use of force internationally?

Interpreting Article 51.

Shall the UN proviso permitting individual or collective selfdefense before the Security Council has taken measures “if an armed 
attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations” be deemed 

to apply also to imminent attacks—thus allowing preemption? Shall 

Article 51 be interpreted as prohibiting preventive or humanitarian 

military operations not authorized by the Security Council, or 

as simply not covering such operations in the absence of Security 

Council authorization? 

The Role of NATO.

Should members of NATO, if the Security Council has refused 

authorization or is deliberating too slowly, then always seek 

authorization (if time allows) from the NATO Council for the use of 

force internationally? What obligations should be put on European 

members (or the European Union [EU] when acting collectively) to 

give NATO rather than the EU the “second refusal” rights? What 

role and procedures should NATO adopt for cases in which nonNATO members of the transatlantic community would be crucially 

helped by NATO’s legitimation of their resort to force and tangible 

assistance?

Coalitions within NATO.

When the transatlantic community and/or NATO is unable to 

forge a consensus sought by some members to authorize the use of 

force, what should be the relationship between the organization as a 

whole and the coalition within it seeking legitimation of its planned 

military operations? What less-than-consensus voting arrangements 

and procedures can be devised to allow a substantial group of 

members—say the EU, or a U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” who 

feel impelled to use force—to employ some of NATO’s assets, 

particularly its communications and warning systems?

NATO’s Decisionmaking Processes.

What discretion should the Supreme Allied Commander Europe 

(SACEUR) have over conduct-of-war decisions? How much should 

he be constrained by the North Atlantic Council (NAC) and by the 
National Military Authorities? How much should the Council and/or 

SACEUR defer to the recommendations of the multinational Defense 

Planning Committee? Should all significant escalation decisions (e.g., 

employing a new category of weapon; bringing an additional class 

of targets under attack; significantly augmenting troop strength; and 

cease-fires) be referred back to the Council for prior authorization?

The Authority of Sub-coalition and National Military 

Commanders.

How much autonomy of command and control should be retained 

by sub-coalition commanders (e.g., the U.S.-led operation in Kosovo 

and the EU military operation in Bosnia) and national commanders? 

What are the consequences of maintaining effective transatlantic 

coordination of military operations, let alone disciplined command 

and control of multinational forces, if other members of NATO 

emulate the standing U.S. policy, promulgated in Presidential 

Decision Directive 25 (May 1994): “The President retains and will 

never relinquish command authority over U.S. forces?” 

The controversies have been driven by changes in the structure 

of world politics and changes in the shape of war, and the interaction 

between these two domains of the global system. The political 

changes are producing a “polyarchic” system of fickle alliances 

and loose security communities in which allies or supporters on 

one issue can be adversaries on other issues, and today’s friend 

may be tomorrow’s enemy. The military innovations are reducing 

the requirements for foreign bases and force prepositioning, and in 

some cases are leading national security officials to view multilateral 

military arrangements as strategic and tactical liabilities. 

In addressing the resulting predicaments posed for basic U.S. 

national security policy, this monograph focuses primarily on the 

multilateral institutions and norms in the transatlantic community 

that deal with the use of force. The analysis is not simply of what has 

been happening in and to these multilateral institutions and norms. 

It is equally an exploration of ways the United States can participate 

in and help shape the multilateral institutions and norms of the 

transatlantic community so as to preserve their contributions to U.S. 
and international security while avoiding excessive constraints on 

U.S. military flexibility.

MULTILATERALISM: ITS SCOPE AND VARIETY

Multilateralism, as commonly understood among scholars and 

practitioners in the field of international security, denotes an official 

government-to-government relationship among a group of countries 

(three or more) in which the members of the multicountry group are 

accountable to one another for their actions in the domain that is 

the particular concern of the group.1 U.S. foreign policy will always 

comprise a mix of multilateralism, bilateralism, and unilateralism.2

Yet a foreign policy broadly committed to advance and sustain 

multilateral process and institutions can be expected to impact on 

U.S. grand strategy, military plans and operations, and coercive 

diplomacy quite differently than a foreign policy determined to 

maximize U.S. flexibility and freedom of action, particularly in the 

use of force.

An assessment of the advantages and disadvantages to the 

United States of a foreign policy substantially constrained by 

multilateral accountability in the use of military force must start with 

an appreciation of the different kinds of international accountability 

arrangements available in the international security field. The benefits 

and costs of multilateralism will, of course, vary with different kinds 

of accountability and for different types of military operations.

The domain of concern that prompts commitments of mutual 

accountability may be a singular issue involving all members 

of the group, as in the Missile Technology Control Regime. The 

instruments of accountability may be highly specialized as in the 

Chemical Weapons Convention. There may be a complex set of issues 

around which the members of the multilateral group all gravitate 

and which stimulates them to define the group as a community—for 

example, the North Atlantic Community. The domain of concern 

that is the group’s reason for existence, as in the case of the so-called 

World Community comprised of the members of the UN, may be 

as all-encompassing and amorphous as “international peace and 

security.” 
The multilateral processes and institutions to which the United 

States subscribes (or that are available to the United States to 

participate in or join) and their potential for constraining their 

members’ unilateral action can be arrayed along two intersecting 

dimensions: One is the extent-of-institutionalization spectrum, ranging 

from ad hoc interactions when information and/or threats are 

exchanged and behavioral adjustments are negotiated or refused, 

to permanently-sitting decisionmaking institutions. The other is the 

extent-of-accountability spectrum, ranging from promises to keep the 

other participants in a multilateral arrangement informed of what 

the United States is doing (or will be doing) in a particular domain of 

behavior, to binding commitments not to act in that domain without 

approval from the other participants.3

These two intersecting dimensions of multilateralism can be 

represented, as in the figure below, as establishing four quadrants: A, 

B, C, and D—with A involving arrangements with the most constraints 

on U.S freedom of action, and D involving the least constraints. In 

which quadrant a particular kind of multilateral arrangement falls 

will often be conjectural and debatable. The locations of some are 

obvious, while others are not placed that clearly. The purpose of 

arraying and representing them in this way is only to keep before us 

the realization that multilateral obligations and constraints come in 

many sizes and shapes, and any statements about the benefits and 

costs it (multilateralism) has for the U.S. military and diplomatic 

effectiveness require substantial and specific situational analysis.

Quadrant A includes the permanently seated “collective security” 

institutions: the UN and NATO—both of which legally bind 

their members to adhere to the decisions of their highest political 

bodies: the UN Security Council and the NAC, both of which have 

permanent secretariats authorized to implement such decisions. But 

neither institution is in the upper-left (truly supranational) corner 

of Quadrant A. Under the UN Charter, the United States, like the 

four other permanent members of the Security Council, legally can 

protect its freedom of action by exercising its veto or by exercising its 

Article 51 right to engage in self-defense (with or without allies) when 

the Security Council is unable to act in a timely manner. Similarly, 

although the NATO Treaty obligates all members to consult together


Permanently-sitting Institutions

A	 B

Approval by Others	 	 Information to Others

C	 D

Ad-hoc Interactions

Figure 1. Kinds of Mutilateral Constraint.

whenever any one of them considers its territorial integrity, political 

independence, or security to be threatened (Article 4) and to regard 

an armed attack against one or more of them to be an attack against 

them all and accordingly to come to the assistance of the country 

or countries being attacked (Article 5), the United States and other 

members retain the functional equivalent of a veto by the sacrosanct 

tradition of making NAC decisions by consensus. Moreover, the 

NATO treaty, like the UN Charter, leaves it to the members (in 

the absence of firm and detailed direction from the NAC and its 

subordinate bodies) to implement their Article 5 obligation 

individually or in concert with other countries. Thus when the 

NAC, having for the first time invoked Article 5 in reaction to 

9/11, subsequently failed to fall in line behind all of Washington’s 

counterterrorism strategies, the George W. Bush administration 

felt no need to be constrained by NATO and no legal inhibitions 

to constructing a “coalition of the willing” outside of NATO for 

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.4

Another permanently-sitting institution to which members have 

ceded a good deal of authority is the International Atomic Energy 

Agency (IAEA), in its role of principal negotiator and verifier of 

countries’ obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty 

(NPT). Yet, when the IAEA fails to issue a factual or legal finding 

the United States wants—as in the months prior to Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM, when the Bush administration sought a 

definitive endorsement of its own claims that Saddam’s regime was 

reconstituting its nuclear weapons program—Washington has felt 
unconstrained to make its own findings and even to denigrate the 

competence of the IAEA. 

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, 

created by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which the 

United States and over 170 countries are parties, is also in Quadrant 

A. Article 9 of the CWC accords this implementing organization 

the authority to order and have its technical secretariat carry out 

challenge inspections on the territory of a party that any other party 

has requested to verify compliance. However, most of the multilateral 

arms control treaties and confidence and security building measures 

that the United States is (or could someday be) party to fall in the 

upper right corner of Quadrant C. They often require that the United 

States participate in a regime of international verification, but any 

such verification arrangements must in each instance be agreed to 

by the United States. Moreover, the United States retains the right, 

usually stipulated in the text of the treaty or agreement, to withdraw 

from the arrangement within a specified timeframe after having 

given notice to its treaty or agreement partners.

Some permanent institutions, on the model of the Organization 

of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) or the Organization 

of American States (OAS), while operating with secretariats, are 

situated in Quadrant B since they are primarily consultative. The 

OSCE performs important conflict mediation services, but the United 

States is not bound by the outcomes.

Many of the postwar/postconflict peacekeeping and reconstruction and stabilization efforts the United States is temporarily 

involved in—e.g., Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti—are 

located at the juncture between Quadrants A, B, and C. Characteristically, they involve substantial and very difficult coordination 

and cooperation between the United States and the countries with 

whom the United States is sharing such responsibilities, with the 

often-flimsy host-country regimes, as well as with the international 

agencies—whether UN or NATO, the African Union, the OAS, or 

other regional auspices that may be devised. Where arrangements 

include the deployment of U.S. military units and where operational 

necessities may require the temporary placement of U.S. forces 

under the authority of a foreign commander, the basic provision 

in Presidential Decision Directive 25 for such circumstances is 
supposed to apply: namely, that the “U.S. reserves the right to 

terminate participation at any time and to take whatever actions it 

deems necessary to protect U.S. forces if they are endangered.”5

Quadrant D arrangements are those requiring a minimal extent 

of institutionalization and little, if any, ceding of authority to the 

entire partnership of the multilateral arrangement. Examples are the 

“coalition of the willing” that the Bush administration put together 

for Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, the U.S.-run Proliferation Security 

Initiative for interdicting the shipment of WMD-related materials, 

and the six-power negotiating forum (comprising the United States, 

China, Russia, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea) for dealing 

with North Korea’s nuclear program. 

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF MULTILATERALISM 

Although there is a wide range of multilateral security arrangements in which the United States participates, a general outline of the 

kinds of benefits and costs that are usually expected to flow from acting 

multilaterally can provide a basis for analyzing the evolving pattern 

and problems of multilateralism in the transatlantic community. 

The generally expected benefits and costs of multilateralism also can 

provide broad benchmarks for evaluating suggestions for designing 

multilateralist approaches that will best serve U.S. interests. 

Benefits Sought from Multilateral Commitments.

1. Legitimacy.

Multilateral direction, authorization, or approval of the use of 

force by the United States abroad confers a degree of legitimacy to 

military operations, without which it is considerably more difficult 

to generate the congressional and popular support required to 

provision and sustain them. Whether or not the term legitimacy itself 

is used in the official or popular discourse, decisions to go to war or 

to dramatically escalate an on-going war almost always are shaped in 

part by views, domestic and foreign, as to whether the contemplated 

actions are legal and moral. Legal is taken to mean consistent with 

the U.S. Constitution and congressional legislation, but also with 
treaties to which the United States is a party. “Moral” tends to be 

defined in the policy community as consistent with prevailing views 

in the nation—and on the part of friendly and respected allies—about 

when and for what purposes war is justified and about whether 

certain weapons and targets and levels of destruction should be 

prohibited: what the “just war” theorists call jus ad bellum and jus 

in bello considerations. When the populace and policy-community 

is highly uncertain or divided over the legal and moral legitimacy 

of a contemplated use of force, judgments rendered in the relevant 

multinational arenas can often tip the domestic debate one way or 

another. 

From the Truman administration’s determination to obtain 

UN authorization in 1950 for going to war in Korea (which it was 

able to do under the UN flag), to the Kennedy administration’s 

effort in 1962 to get the UN Security Council to brand the Soviet 

missile deployments in Cuba as a threat to international peace and 

security, to the Bush administration’s diplomatic success in 1990 in 

obtaining a Security Council mandate to oust Iraq from Kuwait by 

whatever means necessary, to the Clinton administration’s conduct 

of the war in Kosovo as a NATO operation, to the failed efforts of 

the Bush administration in 2002 and early 2003 to obtain either UN 

or NATO backing for the regime-change preventive war against 

Iraq, to its more successful effort to garner international support for 

and participation in the reconstruction and internal pacification of 

Iraq, U.S. Presidents and most of their high-ranking foreign policy 

advisers have appreciated the multilateralism-confers-legitimacy 

dynamic. 

The high-level appreciation of how multilateralism can tip the 

foreign policy debate is validated by public opinion research showing 

that when a U.S. military action has multilateral blessing, and, better 

yet, participation, popular support almost always is enhanced. A 

careful and comprehensive study by Richard Eichenberg of opinion 

surveys from 1981 to 2005 concludes that “multilateral sentiment 

does matter.” In numerous episodes (Lebanon peacekeeping, Bosnia, 

Kosovo, and the confrontation with North Korea over nuclear 

weapons), his analysis of polling data shows support for using 

U.S. military force is at least 10 percentage points higher when the 

question mentions UN or NATO participation.6
10

Clearly, the use of force is likely to receive greater public support 

if it can be packaged as a multilateral operation. But while seeking 

the added legitimation that multilateralism can confer, all U.S. 

administrations have been careful to preserve this nation’s ultimate 

prerogative of making its own determinations of when and where U.S. 

force is warranted, and of what rules of engagement should constrain 

the U.S. military operations. Thus, even in the Clinton administration, 

for whom multilateralism was perhaps their proudest emblem, it was 

prudentially and explicitly circumscribed: “The decision whether to 

use force is dictated first and foremost by our national interests,” said 

the NSC’s 1999 report to Congress, A National Security Strategy for a 

New Century, issued under the President’s name. “In those specific 

areas where our vital interests are at stake, our use of force will be 

decisive and, if necessary, unilateral.”7

2. Influence Over Others.

The more deeply-cutting the multilateral oversight and direction 

of military operations, the less likely it is that allies will act on their 

own contrary to U.S. interests or strategic preferences. This was the 

main reason for U.S. insistences during the Cold War for rigidlycentralized NATO command and control under the Supreme Allied 

Commander Europe—always an American—of all of NATO’s shortrange and battlefield nuclear weapons. Even if during a rapidly 

escalating battle SACEUR ordered the release of battlefield nuclear 

weapons to national units, these national units actually could not 

use the nuclear ordnance unless subsequently ordered by SACEUR. 

As the technology matured, these controls were reinforced by an 

electronically activated permissive action link (PAL) system. The 

deep multilateral NATO-centered command and control procedures 

for any combat operations by any NATO member in Europe was 

also the institutional design for assuring Britain, France, and other 

allies that a rearmed Germany would be subordinated into a 

supranational command apparatus. Now, with the disappearance 

of credible nuclear escalation threats, the Europeans are agitating 

to do away with such NATO-centered (insofar as that means U.S.-

directed) constraints on their security policies. 
11

Meanwhile, the United States, recalling the insufficiently 

vigorous reactions by some European country peacekeeping units 

against harassment in Bosnia and the intra-alliance disputes over 

bombing targets in Kosovo,8 has developed its own worries about 

the constraining effects of NATO-run military operations.

3. Burden Sharing.

When U.S. military operations are conducted on the basis of 

multilateral authorization, the members of the authorizing agency 

or endorsing group can be tapped for contributions—financial, 

material, troops—to the operation. Financial contributions extracted 

from coalition partners were especially helpful to the United States 

in the Gulf War (1991), in contrast to the paucity of contributions to 

help defray the costs of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, undertaken 

with endorsement from a vary narrow coalition. Recent moves to 

multilateralize reconstruction and stability missions in Afghanistan 

and Iraq, motivated largely by burden sharing hopes, are beginning 

to produce limited returns.

4. Access to the Battlefield.

Particularly when planned military operations include the use 

of foreign bases, navigation through the territorial waters of other 

countries, or overflying their territory, treating those who possess 

these facilitating assets as part of America’s decision family can be 

crucial to the effective achievement of one’s objectives. The lack of 

adequate consultation in NATO by the Reagan administration prior 

to Operation EL DORADO CANYON involving U.S. air strikes 

against some of some of Libya’s military facilities and Muammar 

Qaddafi’s personal compound, required a more cumbersome launch 

of the operation from Britain rather than from air bases in Germany 

and Italy, a longer and more detectable access path that could have 

compromised the surprise factor. In Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, 

the inability of U.S. forces to invade Iraq through Turkish territory 

(it was not a NATO operation, which would have involved Turkey; 

nor did Turkey, because of its domestic politics, have any intention 

of becoming involved) proved very costly. 
12

5. Access to More Intelligence.

A vital component of U.S. counterterror operations around the 

world, access to the intelligence on terrorist networks, cells, and 

individuals demands, at a minimum, close consultation with numerous national governments. Many of the new forms of technologically 

acquired intelligence as well as old-fashioned spy-acquired 

intelligence require active cooperation with foreign intelligence 

agencies, who as a matter of course expect reciprocal attention to 

their wants. This has become of special importance also in efforts 

to prevent the transnational transfer of fissile material and other 

components of nuclear weapons. The current re-embrace by the U.S. 

government of proactive multilateralism by an administration that 

earlier denigrated it has much to do with these intelligence benefits.

Likely and Possible Costs of Multilateralism.

1. Shared Authority with Those Who May Not Share One’s Priorities.

This problem, which has severely curtailed the willingness of the 

United States to pursue its international security objectives under 

the aegis of the UN Security Council,9 now arises (more than it did 

during the Cold War) also with respect to NATO. The removal of 

the common threat to NATO members from the former Union of 

Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of divergent 

national and subcoalition interests among the widely-enlarged 

membership (turning the organization into a quasi United Nations 

for the transatlantic region) increases the costs and risks of running 

a NATO military operation. The need to expend political capital 

in order to obtain the necessary Council consensus; the pressures 

to compromise and accept lowest-common-denominator and/or 

vague mandates to operational commanders; the likelihood that 

such mandates will be burdened by numerous national caveats 

that can inhibit unity of command and restrict tactical military 

flexibility—all of these inherent costly features of working through 

NATO have led U.S. policymakers to seek out smaller coalitions or 

to act unilaterally when engaging in major military action such as 

the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. And 
13

the probable costs are likely to increase as NATO further enlarges its 

membership. 

2. Inhibition of Timely and Efficient Action.

Merely fulfilling an obligation to give a multilateral organization 

the right of “first refusal” before seeking out a smaller coalition 

or acting unilaterally can be costly if the process of multilateral 

deliberation slows down the deployment of military forces into a 

rapidly progressing conflict. If the multilateral organization after due 

deliberation finally refuses to authorize or conduct the intervention, 

both legitimacy and efficiency suffer. Even if the multilateral 

imprimatur ultimately is obtained, postponing the intervention 

may mean a much larger and costly operation has to be mounted in 

order to counter gains effectively that the adversary meanwhile has 

achieved. Indeed, such mounting costs of delay finally may reduce 

the willingness to mount a military action even on the part of those 

who earlier were ready to intervene. This can be a serious problem in 

humanitarian crises as, for example, where intercommunal conflict 

is escalating into “ethnic cleansing” on the way to genocide. 

Similarly, intrawar tactical or strategic operations can be slowed 

down dangerously or avoided, even when they would be highly 

effective and not at all inconsistent with a mission’s mandate, simply 

because of the need to “kick upstairs” (to multilateral political levels) 

requests for fresh authorization. 

3. Loss of secrecy (and the Effectiveness That Comes with Surprise).

The greater the number of countries involved, obviously the 

greater the risk of loss of secrecy. This is more than the issue of enlarged 

opportunities for espionage, which the information technology of 

fencing off communications through encryption and other devices 

can help counter. It is also a question of the political willingness of 

the parent multilateral organization to delegate sufficient military 

discretion to the operational commanders over multinational fighting 

units for devising and directing surprise and deceptive actions that 

need to be held very tightly in order to succeed. 
14

4. Politicizing of Intrawar Strategies and Distortion of War Aims.

Throughout history politico-military coalitions have been 

bedeviled by the difficulties in preventing political differences among 

allies from distorting military imperatives. This was a problem 

even between the closest of allies in World War II, the British and 

Americans—most prominently over the location and timing of the 

opening of a second front, but also over the final drives into Germany 

and Czechoslovakia. President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower 

wanted to defeat Hitler’s Wehrmacht as decisively and rapidly as 

possible, and without exacerbating Stalin’s suspicions, whereas 

Prime Minister Churchill and his generals also were focused on how 

the location of one’s forces at war’s end would strongly condition the 

postwar bargaining over spheres of influence. The politics of keeping 

coalition partners happy can also affect the timing and terms of war 

termination, as happened in the decision to call a cease-fire in the Gulf 

War after throwing Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait and not to push 

on to Baghdad. There is no reason to expect that NATO operations, 

especially given the Kosovo experience, can be insulated against the 

intrusion of political controversies on military strategy and tactics. 

And as will be discussed later, the Alliance’s proudest poster unit, 

the National Reaction Force, is ready made for such contamination. 

5. Complication of Postwar Reconstruction and Stabilization Efforts.

While one of the benefits of multilateral arrangements for deciding 

on or supporting war is the increased likelihood of burden sharing 

in the aftermath, coalition partners also will want to make sure that 

postwar conditions correspond to the reasons they supported or 

joined in the fighting. Thus, even as, at the time of this writing, the 

United States is anxious to transfer most of the reconstruction and 

stabilization tasks in Afghanistan to NATO, considerable differences 

are emerging between the United States and the Europeans as to the 

degree to which, and how, NATO should take over or share in the 

counterinsurgency operations still being conducted by the United 

States.
15

mULTILATERAlism in the Post-Unipolar World: 

The Impact of Polyarchy

An evaluation of multilateral constraints on the use of military 

force by the United States requires an understanding of the global 

political structure in which these constraints are supposed to 

operate. If the United States is presiding over a basically unipolar 

world, multilateralism will take different shapes and have different 

implications for U.S. security than if multilateralism is operating in a 

multipolar or “polyarchic” world. 

In a unipolar world dominated by the United States, multilateral 

arrangements to which the Unites States is a party are likely to 

function more as instruments for ensuring that others conform to 

U.S. policy preferences and share the burdens with the United States 

of providing global public goods (international peace and security, a 

well-functioning world economy, conservation of the planet’s natural 

resources, and protection of essential ecosystems). In a multipolar 

world, multilateral arrangements—whether institutionalized or 

established ad hoc—are supposed to perform the crucial function of 

moderating balance-of-power rivalries among regional hegemons, 

who,within their regional spheres of influence, may be the leading 

provisioners of international public goods. Also, in a multipolar 

world that is relatively peaceful, inter-regional regimes may be relied 

on for coordinating activities and allocating prerogatives in adjacent 

commons areas (such as rivers, coastal fisheries, international straits, 

and air space), and facilitating international commerce. In the highly 

diverse and often chaotic polyarchic world—to be described below—

multilateral arrangements, especially in the peace and security field, 

are crucial for the minimum world order the United States needs for 

its own security and well-being. Yet many of these arrangements 

are becoming extraordinarily difficult to construct and sustain in the 

configurations that would be feasible in the unipolar or multipolar 

worlds. 

The Unipolar Illusion.

The fashionable idea that the post-Cold War world is unipolar 

oversimplifies today’s complex realities. True, the United States is 
16

the world’s only remaining superpower. But this super power does 

not simply translate into polar power, in the sense of the impact 

exerted by Washington during Cold War. 

The bipolarity of the Cold War system inhered not just in the 

existence of two countries more powerful than any of the rest, but 

also in the massive gravitational pull (geostrategic and ideological) 

by each superpower on others. Each superpower’s influence over the 

international behavior of its allies and clients was so great that it was 

appropriate to regard the whole system, except for the determinedly 

nonaligned countries,10 as in a condition of two-sided polarization.11

Seeing one of the two power-centers of the bipolar system collapse 

in the early 1990s, its sphere of control disintegrate, particularly 

in Eastern Europe, and its satraps around the world left without 

a big-brother military ally and economic patron, many analysts, 

policymakers, and pundits deduced that the system that remained 

was unipolar.12 By the standard (material) measures of power, this 

should still be the case. On the eve of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, 

with a defense budget greater than the combined military budgets 

of the next 15 countries, The United States maintained over 6,000 

nuclear warheads in its strategic nuclear arsenal, the strongest and 

most technologically-sophisticated conventional forces in the world, 

and military deployments in over 100 countries.13 Moreover, in 2005, 

the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States—running 

at more then $10 trillion—is over 20 percent of the world’s entire 

GDP. 

How much effective influence over others does the great 

differential in material power confer? The United States, to be 

sure, is still the most influential single actor, and its cooperation or 

opposition often can determine the fate of policies and programs of 

others around the world. But being the only superpower is not the 

same as having usable power over most others in the system. Some 

forms of power—military, economic, ideational, or the power that 

comes from diplomatic/political skill—may be more or less usable 

vis-à-vis some actors in the system than others. These various types 

of power often are neither fungible nor fully additive into a kind of 

Gross National Power that when posed against the power of another 

state will overcome its resistance, like a magnet pulling on a piece of 

metal.
17

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States often has not 

been able to obtain the cooperation it seeks from other nations, even 

when applying its putative hegemonic weight—benignly through 

providing economic, security, and prestige benefits to those who 

cooperate, or coercively through applying punitive economic or 

political sanctions, or wielding military power. Except in certain 

specifically-defined post-September 11, 2001 (9/11), counterterrorism 

projects, not very many countries have been all that ready to 

coalesce under the U.S. banner—the “bandwagoning” response to 

a hegemon’s exertions of power. Rather, as became dramatically 

and painfully evident in the U.S. failure to gain UN Security Council 

backing for Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, many influential actors in 

the international community, including countries the United States 

used to count as loyal allies, are resisting being pushed around or 

bought off when their interests, values, or grand strategies diverge 

from those of the hegemon.14

The Inadequacy of the Great-Power Multipolarity Model.

If this is not a unipolar world—one in which in which the United 

States, like an omnipotent regent, dispenses rewards and threatens 

sanctions, successfully maintaining order among its otherwise unruly 

wards—what about a multipolar world, a system of great-power 

alignments, power balancing, and concerts?15 Perhaps there can yet 

be a multipolar dynamic among the great powers, analogous to the 

multipolar systems of the past, in which the power game played by 

the major states (possibly five, but as many as a dozen) was the key to 

international stability or a breakdown of world order and peace.16

The emergent 21st century geopolitical reality, however, looks 

quite different from traditional multipolarity. Only two contemporary 

“great powers” are potential sources of serious threats to international 

peace and security in the near future: China, if it resorts to military 

means to take over Taiwan or becomes too aggressive in prosecuting 

its claims in the South China and East China Seas; and possibly a 

dissatisfied Russia that attempts to reassert control over former 

Soviet-controlled areas.17 Japan, in the more distant future (more 

than 5 years out), if it converts its hefty “self-defense” forces into an 

all-purpose military, and particularly if it develops its own nuclear 
18

arsenal, could come into military confrontation with Russia or China 

in ways that threaten overall peace and security.18 The EU, if and 

when it becomes more consolidated, could intensify progressively 

both its economic and diplomatic rivalry with the United States. Yet 

such economic and political conflicts as do emerge between the EU 

and the United States are highly unlikely to escalate to the level of 

threats of force, let alone war, unless preceded by some fundamental 

discontinuities in domestic and world politics. 

The sources of internationally destabilizing actions are more 

likely to be middle powers such as Iraq and Iran (again seeking 

to exert regional hegemony, with or without nuclear weapons), 

or nuclear armed India and Pakistan in a new war over Kashmir, 

or Israel and its neighbors—particularly if their conflicts interfere 

with the industrial states’ access to important economic resources 

or geostrategic locations. The greatest worry vis-à-vis North Korea 

may be an implosion of its governing regime resulting from an 

inability to satisfy the basic needs of its people, in which case both 

its international marketing of nuclear weapons components and 

its temptation to raise diversionary tensions with South Korea 

or Japan are potential serious threats to international peace and 

security. Failed or failing states—like Zimbabwe or Bangladesh, 

or Afghanistan (if current stabilization efforts collapse), or even 

Kosovo after the departure of NATO security forces—could catalyze 

dangerous regional instabilities. Moreover, the entire system can be 

destabilized, and wars initiated and conducted by nongovernment 

actors: violent political movements, terrorist networks, and criminal 

syndicates. 

In the system maturing before us, the precipitating events more 

than ever (except perhaps in medieval Europe) also are likely to come 

in a variety of forms besides the movement of military forces across 

borders: terrorism, subnational and transnational ethnic wars, failed 

domestic political systems, collapsing economies, contraband in 

weapons and drugs, and ecological disasters.19 Rivalries or concerted 

action among the great powers might be important in exploiting 

or countering various of these threats to international peace and 

security, but more often than not, the sources of war and peace will 

lie elsewhere than in the great-power competition. 
19

In short, in contrast to the great-power multipolar systems of 

the past, there are now a much larger number and variety of actors, 

states, and nonstate actors, who can shake up the system. The major 

threats to system equilibrium are not primarily territorial expansion, 

tipping the balance of power through the addition or subtraction 

of allies, or dramatic augmentation of one or another of the great 

powers’ military capabilities. Opposition to a great power’s policies 

that one does not like will rarely take the form of power balancing 

through the formation or tightening of countervailing alliances. 

More likely, opposition will come as irritating, even defiant, acts of 

noncooperation—what I call balking­—such as the refusal of France, 

Russia, and China to vote with the United States on important Iraq 

resolutions before the Security Council, or the refusal of Turkey to 

allow its territory to be used as a base for the invasion of Iraq.

The Emergent Polyarchy.

20

The structure of world politics that has evolved since the end 

of the Cold War still features the global hegemony of the United 

States (not unipolarity) but, increasingly, within a polyarchic field 

of actors—nation-states, terrorist networks, subnational groups, 

transnational religions, multinational enterprises, and global and 

regional institutions. These communities and organizations are often 

in intense competition for resources and the support and loyalty of 

their constituents, many of whom are members of various of the 

competing entities at the same time. Hardly any countries or political 

movements are aligned unidirectionally in their major international 

relationships, either with one another or with the United States. 

The cross-pressures to which countries are subject in the polyarchic 

system make for fickle cooperative and adversary relationships, in 

which today’s ally may be tomorrow’s enemy, depending on the 

issue at hand.

The fact that many NATO countries and members of the previous 

Gulf War coalition were at odds with the United States over how to 

deal with Saddam Hussein in 2002-03 was less an anomaly than an 

expression of the emergent polyarchic realities. Unlike the Cold War 

system (or its hypothetical multipolar or unipolar successors) which 

assumed a high degree of congruence between primary security 
20

communities, trading blocs, and ideological coalitions, world society 

today features a good deal of incongruence—not as an aberration, 

but as a systemic characteristic. Trading partners, such as Canada 

and the United States, may be adversaries on military and arms 

control issues (e.g., national missile defense, the Comprehensive 

Test Ban Treaty, and the ban on land mines) and on how to deal 

with difficult countries within the Hemisphere, such as Cuba or 

Venezuela. Cultural/ideological allies, such as Sweden and Finland, 

may be in serious dispute over navigational and fishing rights. 

Countries engaged in joint military technology projects (Russia and 

the former Soviet states in Central Asia, for example) may have major 

differences over fighting terrorism or combating contraband drugs. 

Allies on global environmental issues (say, India and Malaysia in 

their opposition to international controls on cutting down forests) 

are frequently at odds on questions of human rights or humanitarian 

intervention. Moreover, such cross-pressures often are rooted in a 

stratum of complex relationships at the substate level, wherein some 

sectors in a country want to retain and institutionalize cooperative 

interaction with particular sectors in countries toward which other 

sectors are hostile—a characteristic feature of the U.S.-British-FrenchGerman relationships, of relationships among the EU countries 

themselves, and increasingly between the Japanese and the Chinese. 21

Accordingly, it is becoming difficult to form and sustain reliable 

alliance commitments and collective security arrangements for 

dealing with potential threats from one’s adversaries. Individual 

nations must prepare to fend for themselves—or opportunistically 

seek allies of convenience ad hoc for prosecuting the conflict at hand 

(as the United States did in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM)—in the 

process of loosening the constraints on unilateral action supposed 

to prevail in multilateral security communities. The world might 

seem to be reverting back to the traditional self-help system of 

determinedly sovereign nation-states. But the “anarchy” of the 

traditional system was, by comparison, quite stable. National leaders 

could by and large control what went on within their jurisdictions 

and could quite reliably commit their countries to alliances in 

order to counter the power of their aggressive adversaries. In the 

polyarchic world, there are many more “loose cannons” (literally 

and figuratively) capable on their own of generating havoc in the 
21

system, destabilizing governments as well as international peace 

and security arrangements—not only Osama bin Laden, but 

transnational entrepreneurs and pirates of weapons and high-tech 

knowledge, and even respectable multinational corporations with a 

vested interest in who runs the government in countries where they 

have subsidiaries.

Yet polyarchy is not without conflict-moderating features. The 

dense transnational networks of interdependence and multiple 

and diverse relationships of groups and countries in at least the 

industrialized regions mean that international adversaries are likely 

to have economic partners and/or ethnic “brothers” and “sisters” in 

the population of societies against which they are in conflict. These 

crosscutting attachments can work as a break on efforts to generate 

the total nation-to-nation hostility required to mobilize domestic 

support for war. But these same characteristics mitigate against 

the durable and credible international alliance commitments and 

effective action by global or regional collective security organizations 

to deter war, let alone to conduct it. 

“Berlin Plus” Plus.

The rifts that have become commonplace among members of 

NATO over when to go to war and rules of engagement can be 

seen as a natural expression of the emergent polyarchy. Exhibit A, 

because of its implications for the kind of multilateralism that is the 

focus of this monograph, is the maturation of the EU’s determination 

to develop European security and defense policies and capabilities 

distinct from NATO’s. When it became evident that the Europeans 

were determined to build some form of common European defense 

entity, the United States decided to accommodate to the new reality 

and support recognition by NATO, formalized by the foreign and 

defense minister meetings in Berlin and Brussels in June 1966, 

of a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) within the 

organization. The NATO Council also decided, however, in an 

ambiguous and open-ended formulation that would subsequently 

generate intense controversy, that NATO assets were to be made 

available for crisis management operations led by the Western EU. 
22

The internal NATO imbroglio over unresolved questions about 

the transferable assets in so-called Berlin Plus agreements—what 

were they exactly? What European entity would receive them? 

Under what circumstances? For precisely what purposes and under 

what rules and command arrangements?—was sparked in December 

1998 by the joint statement issued by President Jacques Chirac and 

Prime Minister Tony Blair at the conclusion of their summit meeting 

in Saint-Malo, France. The Franco-British declaration raised hackles 

in Washington both for what it said and what it did not say about 

the ESDI. The startling words were that “the Union must have the 

capacity for autonomous action.” Autonomous action did not sound 

particularly consistent with the basic Berlin-Plus stipulation that the 

ESDI would always operate within the NATO framework and could 

use temporarily “separable but not separate” NATO assets. And there 

was nothing in the Chirac-Blair statement to counter explicitly the 

implication that “autonomous” action could encompass European 

go-it-alone military initiatives (or defections from U.S.-sponsored 

NATO policies) subversive of the very ethos of the transatlantic 

Alliance.22

Four days after the Chirac-Blair demarche, U.S. Secretary of 

State Madeleine Albright, addressing the NATO foreign ministers 

meeting in Brussels, voiced the U.S. concerns. Any such initiative, 

she insisted, “must avoid preempting Alliance decisionmaking by 

de-linking ESDI from NATO, avoid duplicating existing efforts, and 

avoid discriminating against non-EU members.”23 Underlying these 

“three Ds,” as they came to be called, was what the U.S. Ambassador 

to NATO coined the “fourth D”: the long-standing anxiety that there 

could be an even more basic decoupling of Europe and America, in 

which each would go its own way in defining threats that warranted 

going to war and in designing and carrying out its own grand 

strategy.24

The essentials in the St. Malo vs. four Ds debate of 1998 set the 

parameters of the Euro-American dialog/confrontation that was 

exposed dramatically in the UN Security Council debates leading 

up to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, and that has continued, albeit 

not as loudly, in Brussels. There have been imaginative efforts on 

both sides and in Brussels to bridge the divide, especially in the 

wake of 9-11. The most impressive product of this conflict-resolution 
23

diplomacy is the so-called “Framework Agreement” in an exchange 

of letters between the EU Secretary General/High Representative 

and the NATO Secretary General dated March 17, 2003, reaffirming 

and elaborating upon “Berlin Plus” assurances that the EU could 

access NATO assets for EU-led military operations (called “crisis 

management operations”). 

The major elements of the “Framework” (which persists as the 

basis for continuing NATO-EU cooperation) include:

• assurances of EU access to NATO capabilities and common 

assets such as communication units and headquarters for EUled crisis management operations;

• assurances of EU access to NATO’s planning capabilities for 

EU-led crisis management operations;

• procedures for release, monitoring, return, and recall of such 

assets and capabilities;

• terms of reference for NATO’s Deputy SACEUR—who 

in principle will be the commander of any EU-led military 

operation under the “Berlin Plus” arrangements; and,

• NATO-EU consultation arrangements for any such 

operations.25

This framework for implementing “Berlin Plus” would, of course, 

require further situation-by-situation implementing arrangements, 

which, predictably, would be bedeviled by the details. The on-going 

consultations for EU’s role in Bosnia and Kosovo are cases in point.

Prognosis. 

The Euro-American divisions over NATO strategies and 

arrangements, and also the divisions within the EU over the European 

Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), are of a structural kind, 

emanating from the complex fault-lines and cross-pressures of the 

emergent polyarchy. These fault-lines and cross-pressures should be 

regarded as expressions of entirely natural differences in national 

interest among members of the transatlantic community—reflected 

in a myriad of divergent policies toward, for example, the IsraelPalestine problem, the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, 

Kurdish independence aspirations, the Russia-Georgia conflict over 
24

the breakaway provinces, the Chinese military buildup and ChinaTaiwan tensions, Turkish-Greek tensions over Cyprus and islands in 

the Aegean, conflicting oil exploitation plans for the Caspian region, 

Darfur and/or a new flare-up of bloodletting in Rwanda, and the 

Chavez-Castro axis. 

The polyarchic characteristics of world politics make it very 

unlikely that NATO, any more than the UN, will be able to conduct 

actual military operations effectively other than on a modular basis—

that is, with small subsets of its membership. Also, the prospect 

of EU members of NATO (as contemplated under the Berlin-plus 

formulation) themselves putting together multinational units for the 

actual conduct of military operations will be most likely with small 

subsets of the EU membership. And in the EU, as well as NATO, 

the makeup of these multilateral modules are likely to vary from 

situation to situation.

The principal conclusion to be drawn from the recognition 

that polyarchy, and not unipolarity, has become the emergent 

geopolitical reality is that the bargaining costs—the political capital, 

and sometimes the economic capital, the United States must expend 

to gain and sustain multilateral cooperation—are rising. Query: What 

is happening to the military value of multilateralism? 

THE IMPACT OF MILITARY TRANSFORMATION

A principal strategic consequence of the emergent global 

polyarchy—the need to be able to use force on behalf of U.S. interests 

without having to depend on the cooperation of allies—puts a 

premium on military capabilities that can be used unilaterally. This 

dynamic channels the stream of military innovation in the direction it 

has been heading anyway due to the so-called revolution in military 

affairs (RMA)—a.k.a., transformation. The resulting development 

of unilaterally usable military capabilities confirms fears on all 

sides that the cement of alliance solidarity is crumbling. Even with 

respect to NATO, the most integrated of the multilateral security 

communities, the United States and its allies, although pledged to 

regard an attack on any one of them as an attack on all, anticipate 

that member governments (especially given NATO’s enlargement) 

often will have very different views of the stakes. Accordingly, the 
25

United States and its militarily significant coalition partners—most 

visibly the West European members of NATO—are each developing 

modular capabilities and contingency plans for opting in or out of 

the sub-coalitions that might be willing to go to war. 

What is strongly given by the basic political and economic trends 

at the start of the 21st century—that the United States can no longer 

look forward to a world made up of relatively permanent allies and 

adversaries—is becoming geostrategically acceptable because of the 

trends in military capability now maturing. Moreover, this prognosis 

for looser and less dependable alliances reinforces the arguments of 

RMA proponents that the unilaterally-usable capabilities becoming 

feasible are imperative to incorporate into the country’s military 

arsenal. 

The awareness in foreign capitals that the United States is 

preparing to accommodate to the trends in military technology that 

can reduce the salience of alliances only deepens tensions between 

Washington and other capitals over the unilateralist trend in U. S. 

diplomacy across the board, which, in turn, intensifies that trend. If 

it is no longer a vital security interest of the United States to maintain 

allies around the globe, then even existing U.S. alliance commitments 

suffer some loss in credibility, as do the commitments on the part of 

our alliance partners to stand by the United States when we need 

them. And if the future dependability of allies, for forward bases, 

overflight rights, close coordination of intelligence, and coalition 

combat operations, is thereby further reduced, the incentives for 

acquiring the military wherewithal to go it alone are all the greater.

Privileging Flexibility. 

The tangible military benefits of multilateralism—reliable allies 

who will provide forward bases for U.S. troops, airplanes, ships, and 

other military resources, and who, at a minimum, will permit U.S. 

forces to traverse their airspace and territorial waters in wartime—

continue to be important. But some of the effects of the RMA are 

reducing the need to count on such allied cooperation. Indeed, 

the call for military capabilities that are alliance-insensitive (though 

they are never publicly called that) has been standard fare in the 

Pentagon’s transformation program. Typically, the 2001 Quadrennial 
26

Defense Review called for “the capability to send well-armed and 

logistically-supported forces to critical points around the globe, even 

. . . to locations where the support infrastructure is lacking or has 

collapsed”—code words for we may not have supportive allies in 

the locale of a crucial military operation, but we need to be able to 

get there and fight nonetheless.26

Fortuitously, from the standpoint of the perceived need for 

alliance-insensitive capabilities, U.S. forces that can function 

effectively with or without the cooperation of foreign governments 

or multilateral organizations have been materializing anyway as a 

result of the basic directions of military-technological innovation. Yes, 

much of the new technology, particularly in the information field, 

is conducive to multilateral interoperability of countries’ assets and 

also to wide and deeply-integrated coordination of military activities 

among allies, in the sharing of information and the command and 

control of military movements and combat operations. But it also 

permits a high degree of modular separability. Not only can different 

sets of countries quickly activate a multinational operation. National 

components, individually or in special subcoalitions, can disengage 

from the larger multinational information and command system, 

either to stay out of a conflict or to fight on their own, without 

paralyzing the multinational system. 

The technology-driven developments, plus the strategic 

requirement for such operational flexibility, are transforming the 

existing U.S. alliance-oriented force posture into one that can fight 

with very few allies, or ultimately even without allies where necessary. 

As the U.S. posture becomes progressively alliance-insensitive, there 

will be less need of allied concurrence before undertaking major 

military moves. This will free U.S. military commanders (including 

the Commander-in-Chief) to pursue flexibly whatever strategies they 

deem to be most cost-effective as calculated in terms of U.S. resources 

and interests. It will also make it easier for the United States to resort 

to force unilaterally or to threaten to do so as a bargaining chip in 

diplomacy. 

A prominent expression of the alliance-free force posture that is 

materializing is the increasing reliance on sea-based (as opposed to 

land-based) airpower in situations where forward basing is required 

for diplomatic pressure or projecting U.S. striking power into another 
27

country. Aircraft carriers, although increasingly vulnerable to shorebased cruise missile attack, usually can deploy close enough to target 

areas while remaining in international waters and can stay seaborne 

for extended periods without drydock servicing. Meanwhile, the 

range and accuracy of both ship-launched and air-launched cruise 

missiles is increasing, developments that also reduce the need to 

obtain overflight rights from countries en route to the target sites. As 

the U.S. Navy likes to put it,

. . . with increasing overflight limitations and continuing reductions in 

overseas basing rights, only naval forces can maintain assured access 

to most regions of the world. Naval forces are powerful instruments of 

national policy because of the self-sufficiency and freedom from hostnational political constraints.27

Or as the Chief of Naval Operations advertised in his July 2005 

congressional testimony, the Navy can bring “persistent and longrange power projection into the fight without a permission slip.”28

Although much of the technology for mid-course and terminal 

guidance of the new missile-delivered ordinance will be seabased, much of it also will have to be airborne or space-deployed. 

Recognizing this, and anxious to retain its primacy in future-oriented 

force planning, Project Air Force at the RAND Corporation has since 

the late 1980s been urging that,

the U.S. Air Force should . . . seek to exploit the reach of air power to 

minimize the numbers of people and machines it must move into the 

forward area and into the range of enemy capabilities. . . .

. . . . . 

Assets capable of striking hard across the globe. . . . will be at a premium, 

while “short-legged” platforms, or systems dependent on platforms 

based in the theatre, may find limited use.29

Anticipating the need to rapidly deploy and sustain ground 

forces into areas where, because of the lack of long-standing U.S. 

allies, developed ports and large airfields would be unavailable, 

the Defense Department’s “Transformation Study” called for new 

efforts to develop the country’s high speed sealift and ultra-heavy 

airlift capacity, plus innovative platforms for en-route refueling.30

The contemplated transformation in U.S. capabilities and strategy is 
28

in the direction of less dependence on forward long-term stationing 

of forces abroad and more on being able to get into zones of combat 

quickly whether or not allies are around to help or support the 

required military operations.

The “Global Posture Review” announcements starting in August 

2004 of planned realignments and redeployments of the U.S. forces 

based overseas have been fully consistent with the fundamental move 

toward an alliance-insensitive grand strategy. “We have developed a 

set of new concepts,” the Secretary of Defense told the Senate Armed 

Services Committee:

to govern the way we align ourselves in the coming years and decades. 

A first notion is that our troops should be located in places where they 

are wanted, welcomed, and needed. And in some cases, the presence and 

activities of our forces grate on local populations and have become an 

irritant for host governments. . . .

. . . .

A second governing concept is that the American troops should be 

located in environments that are hospitable to their movements. . . . [W]e 

need to be able to deploy them to trouble spots quickly. Yet over time, 

some host countries and their neighbors have imposed restrictions on the 

movement and use of our forces. So it makes sense to place a premium 

on developing more flexible legal and support arrangements with our 

allies and partners where we might choose to locate, deploy, or exercise 

our troops.

Many of our current legal arrangements date back a century or more. We 

need our international arrangements . . . to reflect the new realities and 

to permit operational flexibility. They have to help, not hinder, the rapid 

deployment and employment of U.S. and coalition forces worldwide in 

a crisis. 

Third, we need to be in places that allow our troops to be usable and 

flexible.

. . . .

Finally, we believe we should take advantage of advanced capabilities 

that allow us to do more with less. The old reliance on presence and mass 

reflects the last century’s industrial-age thinking.31

The implementation of these flexibility objectives, explained the 

Secretary, did not mean a wholesale dismantling of America’s main 

operating bases in Germany, Italy, the UK, Japan, and Korea, but 
29

their “consolidation.” Flexibility also would require, though, gaining 

access to a broader range of facilities with little or no permanent U.S. 

presence. In the Middle East, this would mean maintaining what he 

described as “‘warm’ facilities for rotational forces and contingency 

purposes.” And in Africa and the Western hemisphere, “we 

envision a diverse array of smaller cooperative security locations for 

contingency access.”32

The objective, clearly, is to maintain the capacity to project U.S. 

military power to any trouble spot on the globe, but not to be dependent 

on any particular ally or set of allies in order to do so effectively. And 

the President and Secretary of Defense have mandated the armed 

services to incorporate technologies, develop strategies, and negotiate 

basing arrangements that will allow this objective to be realized.

Avoiding Multilateral Drag.

Despite repeated official reaffirmations of the crucial role alliances 

play in U.S. national security policy, and NATO’s invocation of the 

treaty’s Article V solidarity commitment in response to the 9/11 

terrorist attacks, when it comes to actually organizing a military 

operation in which the United States, and not just its coalition partners, 

must be constrained by multilateral obligations, Washington balks. 

Given the uneven capacity of allies to incorporate the fruits of the 

RMA and the resulting transformation deficits for joint operations 

with the United States, it should be no surprise that the United States 

has been more willing to talk the talk than to walk the walk. 

The rapid decisionmaking that is required between the time of 

acquiring crucial information on enemy targets and the need to attack 

them can turn coalition coordination arrangements into strategic and 

tactical liabilities. This encumbrance, which became evident during 

the Kosovo War, was one of the reasons the American military refused 

some of the offers from NATO allies to participate in the military 

campaign in Afghanistan. In that conflict, too, the American military 

came to realize that its objectives could be achieved more efficiently 

with long-range bombers and transports than with equipment that 

required nearby basing and overflight arrangements, which often 

included constraints on U.S. combat operations. “The chief lesson of 
30

Afghanistan, for America,” opined The Economist, “is that it can fight 

its wars by itself.”33

In both the Afghanistan war and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, 

the United States accepted military contributions from coalition 

members mainly out of considerations of enhancing the political 

legitimacy of these wars rather than because of the military necessity 

of such contributions. Although in the aftermath of the prime 

military-assault phase of each of these conflicts, the United States 

military has been quite willing to share the burdens of pacification 

and reconstruction—and even, to some extent, counterinsurgency 

tasks—with foreign militaries and multilateral organizations. 

The NATO Response Force (NRF). Such problematic impacts of 

military transformation on multilateralism are reflected in hopes and 

worries about the NATO Response Force, approved by the Ministers 

of Defense in Brussels in June 2003 and inaugurated with an initial 

rotation of 9,500 troops in October 2003. Hailed by U.S. and NATO 

officials as the “center,” “heart,” and “driving engine” of NATO 

transformation, the NRF as it becomes fully operational (scheduled 

for October 2006) will number some 25,000 troops, combining land, 

sea, air, and special forces of the member nations. The NRF is not 

only to be rapidly deployable (ready to leave for destination X within 

5 days of decision day), but also be able to sustain itself without 

external support for a whole month. The planned package comprises 

a brigade-size land component with forcible entry capability; a naval 

task force composed of one carrier battle group, an amphibious 

task group, and a surface action group; an air component capable 

of 200 combat sorties a day; and special forces that can be called 

upon when necessary. Upon a decision to deploy, member countries 

must transfer the command authority immediately for their NRFcommitted forces to SACEUR. 

As envisioned by Secretary Rumsfeld, the NRF is not to be simply 

a special add-on to NATO’s capabilities, but rather the catalyst of a 

fundamental transformation of the Alliance’s military. Sharing this 

vision, SACEUR General James Jones forecasts that, “NATO will no 

longer have the large, massed units that were necessary for the Cold 

War, but will have agile and capable forces at Graduated Readiness 

levels that will better prepare the Alliance to meet any threat that it 
31

is likely to face in this 21st century.”34 According to NATO’s public 

briefings, the NRF is designed to carry out a range of different 

missions, “anywhere in the world” including:

—deploy as a stand-alone force for NATO treaty Article 5 (collective 

defense) or non-Article 5 crisis response operations such as evacuation 

operations, support disaster consequence management (including 

chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear events), humanitarian 

crisis situations and counter terrorism operations;

—deploy as an initial entry force facilitating the arrival of larger followup forces;

—deploy as a demonstrative force to show NATO’s determination and 

solidarity to deter crises, and quick response operations to support 

diplomacy as required.35

However, the scheme has two inherent problems. First, as NATO 

comes to depend on the multinational, but integrated, NRF to initiate 

virtually all of its military missions, the Alliance risks having paltry 

little to commit at moments of truth, since any decision to deploy the 

NRF still must be made at the level of the North Atlantic Council, 

where the consensus rule applies. When the Council is paralyzed 

by its divisions or is sluggish in resolving them, more “modular” 

responses (such as proposed later in this monograph) may be 

cumbersome to put together ad hoc; and members may not even 

be able to act unilaterally, not having other appropriate national 

contingents of their own in-being and ready to deploy. 

Second, when members, anxious to present a posture of unity to 

the world, do forge a consensus decision to deploy the NRF despite 

seriously divergent national interests, unresolved disagreements 

that can degrade operational effectiveness in the field severely may 

be passed down to SACUER and his subordinate commanders in 

the form of national caveats (special reservations) to the deployment 

mandate. The caveat problem has come to haunt even the staunchest 

champions of the NRF. Secretary Rumsfeld, for one, has been candid 

about the difficulties:

Put yourself in the position of a battlefield commander with a NATO force 

of 12 countries under him. If you’ve got six different sets of rules and 

they’re not allowed to leave a certain area, or they can only fire in self 

defense in an engagement, or they can only be located in certain places or 
32

they can only perform certain kinds of functions—humanitarian functions 

as opposed to military functions. Trying to manage a force like that with 

all those different countries and to get them arranged so that you can do 

what you need to do. . . . That’s a problem. You can’t do your business 

that way.36

Even so, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is 

enthusiastic about the prospects: “When circumstances demand that 

we use the NRF, we will know it. And we should not hesitate, in 

those circumstances, to do so.”37

NATO combat troops in Afghanistan? At the time of this writing 

a test case for the NRF is looming as NATO prepares to expand its 

operation in Afghanistan beyond the 10,000 troops still engaged in 

reconstruction and stabilization tasks in Kabul and in the relatively 

peaceful north and west of the country. The NATO Council, the 

Secretary General, and SACEUR visited Afghanistan in the fall 

of 2005 to assess NATO’s capability for taking over some of the 

counterinsurgency operations now performed largely by the United 

States in the turbulent south. Although strongly urged by the United 

States, the details for implementing the NAC’s authorization to 

increase NATO troops to 17,000 in 2006, under the assumption that 

they may well have to engage in active combat, remain contentious 

among Council members.38 As expected, some of the countries 

planning to contribute troops have been attaching caveats to their 

participation. Again, Rumsfeld himself, talking about plans for 

the force, highlights the predicament: “Clearly if you’re a NATO 

commander in an area of operations and there are different rules 

of engagement, different restrictions on national forces, it makes it 

enormously difficult for the commander to have the flexibility to 

function.”39

The only way to avoid this problem is to ensure that the troops that 

are put under the NATO commander are only from those countries 

willing to agree in advance to either: (a) directives to the NATO 

commander specific enough to allow him to conduct his mission 

effectively, or (b) a mission mandate to the NATO commander that, 

while general in its directives, devolves sufficient authority on to 

the commander to make all necessary implementing decisions on 

his own. This means, however, that those cases where the NATO 

Council may be able to achieve consensus that military action under 
33

the NATO flag is warranted, it should be willing to devolve the 

authority for political-military direction of the operation to a lead 

country or set of countries willing to provide the kind of instructions 

to the designated NATO commander that will allow him to operate 

with sufficient flexibility and command over his multinational 

operation to carry out his mission effectively. 40

CONCLUSION: 

TOWARD A MODULAR MULTILATERALISM 

Findings.

1. Despite repeated official reaffirmations of the crucial role 

alliances play in U.S. national security policy and NATO’s invocation 

of the treaty’s Article V solidarity commitment in response to the 

9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. national security policy must operate in a 

world of weakening alliances. 

2. The fashionable concept of unipolarity does not comprehend 

adequately the emergent global system in which the United States 

must pursue its interests. A system is hardly unipolar where very 

few countries, large or small, gravitate toward (or “bandwagon” 

with) the dominant power. Instead, the system is characterized 

increasingly by other powers balking at U.S. demands. Even in 

America’s primary alliance, NATO, the United States is finding it 

very difficult to generate a consensus—for example, in support of 

its preferred command and control specifications for the new NATO 

Reaction Force, or when it wants the Alliance to take a tough stand 

(say, against Iran). 

3. Nor does the classical concept of multipolarity (an international 

system of competitive great powers) adequately comprehend what is 

going on. In the multipolar world, the great powers characteristically 

view one another as rivals for ascendancy, and coalesce into alliances 

to “balance” the power of a would-be system hegemon. Today, 

however, other major powers—China, Russia, France, Germany, 

Britain, the EU, Japan, India, and Brazil—may often oppose or balk at 

what the United States wants. They may unilaterally, or in fluctuating 

combinations, refuse to follow Washington’s lead; but they show no 

signs of combining in an alliance against the United States.41
34

4. Both the widespread balking at U.S. claims to automatic 

leadership and the lack of a coherent and sustainable coalition 

against the United States are symptomatic of a systemic change 

in world politics—from Cold War bipolarity to post-Cold War 

polyarchy. Polyarchy—the emergent global system—is characterized 

by a myriad of diverse alignments and adversary relationships in 

which, typically, a country’s cooperating partner in one field may 

be its rival or opponent in another field, today’s friend may be 

tomorrow’s enemy, and vice versa. The actors of significance—that 

is, those the United States must bargain with or coerce in order to 

secure its interests—are not only the major powers, but are also lesser 

states, nonstate political or religio-cultural movements, wealthy 

multinational corporations, consortia, cartels, and transnational 

industry associations. Moreover, the bargaining as often as not, 

will take place in multilateral forums (some with memberships and 

voting rules favoring the United States, some with voting rules that 

do not), in which a shifting kaleidoscope of coalitions form and 

reform, depending on the issue at hand. 

5. Thus far, the main U.S. responses to its declining ability to 

mobilize NATO behind its security policies and actions and to call 

the shots in other multilateral forums, have been largely maladaptive: 

unilateralism or denial. 

6. When it comes to using force, the unilateral—go-italone—response has been facilitated by the so-called RMA, a.k.a. 

“transformation.” The relevant transformation developments include 

major improvements in delivering ordnance accurately over long 

distances; rapidly transporting heavy equipment and large numbers 

of personnel into zones of combat; the ability to see the battlefield in 

detail from space-deployed reconnaissance platforms; and the ability 

to direct military operations from remote headquarters. All of these 

reduce the need to pre-position military forces on land, maintain 

bases, or even obtain over-flight rights close to prospective locales 

of belligerency. These developments translate into a more allianceinsensitive force posture.

7. The awareness in foreign capitals that the United States is 

developing a more alliance-insensitive force posture deepens tensions 

between Washington and other capitals over the unilateralist trend 

in U.S. diplomacy, reducing in turn the commitments of allies to 
35

stand by the United States when this country needs them. And as 

the future dependability of allies for forward bases, overflight rights, 

close coordination of intelligence, or, more ambitiously, multinational 

combat operations, is placed in doubt, the incentives for acquiring 

the military wherewithal to go it alone are all the greater.

8. The denial response involves a refusal to admit that, for most 

allies of the United States, the world has changed in the polyarchic 

direction, and that their unwillingness to “bandwagon” with 

Washington on many issues is a perfectly understandable posture. 

The consequence of such denial in Washington of the new global 

realities is frustration at the virtual paralysis of NATO decision and 

command procedures premised on consensus in the Council and on 

disciplined unity down the multinational chain of command.42

9. The U.S. fall-back response to the divisions within NATO has 

been to put together—on an ad hoc basis—“coalitions of the willing.” 

But if constructed in a mood of frustration at other members of 

the transatlantic community, as happened in 2002-03, in contrast 

to the respectful courtship of allies and supporters (members and 

nonmembers of NATO) prior to the 1991 Gulf War, such demarches 

will appear to be little more than disguised unilateralism, and the 

recruited coalition partners risk being branded a coalition of the 

pliant. 

10. The basic European responses to the emergent polyarchy have, 

for the most part, been more adept than the U.S. responses. Through 

the mechanism of agreements negotiated between the EU Secretary 

General and the NATO Secretary General, the Europeans have 

obtained NATO acquiesce to the principle of “autonomous action” by 

EU military forces and also to the right, under the so-called Berlin 

Plus” accords, to access to NATO facilities and equipment on a caseby-case basis for operations in which the EU, but not NATO, would 

be engaged. Moreover, the EU has been elaborating such intraEuropean modular arrangements within its own ESDP that allow 

access to common EU capabilities to subgroups of EU countries who 

are capable and willing of mounting military operations consistent 

with EU purposes. 
36

Recommendations.

A central desideratum in U.S. national security policy should 

be to retain the tangible and legitimacy benefits of transatlantic 

multilateralism while minimizing its constraints on the effective use 

of force. These sometimes competing objectives will require the following 

normative, organizational, and procedural adaptations in NATO and in 

U.S.-NATO and U.S.-EU relations: 

• The United States should recognize—in both declaratory policy and actions—that the amorphous transatlantic community, 

and its expression in an enlarged NATO, has evolved into a 

coalition of coalitions and a much looser association of member 

states than originally assumed in the Washington Treaty. 

• All-for-one and one-for all Article 5 responses to military (or 

terrorist) attacks should still be sought, but they should not be 

touted as the hallmark of the organization. Just as NATO has 

been able to embrace new post-Cold War missions, it should 

be able to adapt to the increasing divergence of its members’ 

security interests by legitimating and elaborating modular 

structures, decision processes, and operational routines. 

• Given the difficulty, in the polyarchic world system, of 

arriving at a consensus when it comes to providing operational 

directives to NATO’s military bodies, the Council should 

be expected to exercise its role as a consultative institution 

more than its role as director of NATO military actions. As 

a “permanently-sitting” summit of the highest national 

security officials of member governments (or their high-level 

representatives) the Council’s quintessential functions should 

be: resolving disputes among members; formulating broad 

jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles; and shaping common 

approaches to other shared problems, such as how to deal 

with civil wars, terrorism, and the proliferation of WMD. 

• The Council’s role with respect to NATO military actions—

whether sitting at the heads-of state level, the foreign ministers 

level, or the defense ministers level—would be primarily as an 

overseer of contemplated and on-going actions conducted in 

the name of NATO to ensure that they were not inconsistent 
37

with the use-of-force principles around which the transatlantic 

community had been able to form a consensus. Moreover, 

the Council should refrain from “passing the buck” to the 

Defense Planning Group, the Secretary General, SACEUR, 

or the Military Committee in the form of excessively-vague 

mandates for putting together and directing a NATO military 

operation (that subsequently might put the Secretary General 

and SACEUR in conflict with national or sub-coalition 

governments or commanders in the field).43

• In situations when the Council is unable to achieve a consensus 

directing SACEUR to activate the NRF or other all-NATO 

military units in response to a threat that some members define 

as sufficiently serious to warrant military action, the Council 

should be prepared (but not obliged) to devolve considerable 

political authority and direction of military operations to 

subgroups of member countries who are ready to respond.44

A case-by-case devolution of authority to sub-coalitions, and 

deference to their relative operational autonomy, should be 

positively endorsed as consistent with, not an exceptional 

deviation from, NATO norms.45

• In order to enhance the ability of NATO commanders in future 

contingencies to perform their missions flexibly and more 

efficiently, and to reduce the drag on their operations from 

technologically deficient and otherwise relatively incapable 

national military units and from individual-country caveats, 

more modular modes of putting together and conducting 

NATO military operations should be adopted.

*****

To sum up: The U.S. grand strategy for conducting the war on 

terrorism, countering the proliferation of WMD, and tending to 

other security threats as they arise should retain the multilateralist 

premise that in the increasingly interdependent world of the 21st 

century the resort to coercive diplomacy or military force requires 

the widest possible international authorization and cooperation. But 

requiring the widest possible support does not mean precluding 
38

essential action in the absence of timely authorization by the preferred 

multilateral organizations: the UN and/or NATO. Consistent with 

Article 51 of the UN Charter (permitting individual and collective 

self-defense when the Security Council is unable to act), the United 

States can protect its important security interests and retrieve the 

otherwise declining legitimacy of its foreign policy by adopting a 

modular approach to collective action in the security field. 

The modular approach (involving more than ad hoc “coalitions of 

the willing”) should be designed to work proactively to institutionalize 

and legitimize a flexible array of political structures, communication 

systems, military command and control procedures, and weapon 

system interoperability arrangements, to facilitate collaboration 

among the different subsets of actors capable and willing to deal 

with future security threats. The overall system should have sufficient 

modularity at various levels to allow particular groupings of countries to 

cooperate—or refuse to cooperate —in using force, but without negating 

the integrity and importance of the multilateral ethos. Authorization 

from the UN Security Council and/or the NATO Council should be 

sought to maximize the legitimacy and burden-sharing benefits of 

multilateralism. When political differences among their members 

preclude timely UN or NATO endorsement of a military operation the 

United States has deemed to be in its security interests, authorization 

and support from the widest multilateral groupings possible should 

still be sought. The actual conduct of military operations, however, 

should always be confined to those modular units that can operate 

with sufficient unity of command and control—minus debilitating 

national caveats—to efficiently achieve the U.S. military objectives. 

ENDNOTES

1. John Ruggie’s definition of multilateralism as “an institutional form that 

coordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized 

principles of conduct” is consistent with my use of the term, although I do not restrict 

multilateralism to institutional forms. Multilateral accountability interactions can 

also take place on a much thinner and/or temporary basis than that which (in 

common discourse) would be regarded as an institutional form. Thus, I regard the 

extent of institutionalization (which could even be zero) as a variable dimension 

of multilateralism. See John Gerard Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an 

Institution,” Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, 

New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 3-47. 
39

2. Many bilateral treaties also contain the kind of mutual accountability that 

would qualify a three-or-more party arrangement as multilateral. The SALT and 

START treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union are prominent 

examples. The multilateral category, however, goes beyond such bilateral one-toone commitments, in that it implies a wider international community to whom the 

parties must be accountable than only each other. 

3. See Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane, “Accountability and the Abuses 

of Power in World Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 99, No. 1, 

February 2005, pp. 29-43, for a comprehensive conceptual analysis of contemporary 

problems of international accountability encompassing economic, environmental, 

and humanitarian issues, as well as international peace and security issues. For an 

earlier analysis, see Seyom Brown, New Forces, Old Forces, and the Future of World 

Politics, New York: Longman, 1995, pp. 191-194, 255-267. 

4. In the 1990-91 Gulf War, the administration of George H. W. Bush had also 

deemed it diplomatically and militarily more efficient to bypass NATO and to 

conduct Operation DESERT STORM with a Washington-constructed and directed 

“coalition of the willing” under a very general UN Security Council mandate. 

5. Presidential Decision Directive 25, Washington, DC: The White House, 

1994.

6. Richard C. Eichenberg, “Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion 

and the Use of Military Force, 1981-2005,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1, 

Summer 2005, pp. 140-177.

7. President William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy for a New Century, 

Washington, DC: The White House, December 1999.

8. On the Bosnia peacekeeping coordination problems, see Ivo Daalder, Getting 

to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy, Washington, DC: Brookings, 2000. 

For the disputes over targeting in the Kosovo War, see General Wesley K. Clark, 

Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Conflict, New York: Public 

Affairs, 2001.

9. The United States sought and obtained UN Security Council authorization 

in the summer of 1950 for conducting the war in Korea, which was called a UN 

Police Action, since the Soviet Union had temporarily abandoned its Security 

Council seat and could not cast a veto. When the Soviets returned to the Council 

in the fall, the United States sought and obtained authorization from the General 

Assembly, in which the United States could still mobilize a majority, for crossing 

the 38th parallel and establishing conditions in the North conducive to the peaceful 

reunification of Korea. 

10. Even most of the professedly “nonaligned” countries tilted rather obviously 

to one side or the other during most of the Cold War: e.g., Egypt toward the Soviet 

Union, Mexico toward the United States. India, widely regarded as the leader of 

the nonaligned movement though never really taking orders from Moscow, also 

tended to take the Kremlin’s side in many Cold War disputes. 
40

11. In the academic literature on international systems, there is no agreed-upon 

definition of the “polar” suffix. Thus, Kenneth Waltz in his Theory of International 

Politics, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979, pp. 161-193, uses it simply to 

designate the number of powerful states in a system, whereas Raymond Aron in 

his Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, New York: Praeger, 1966, pp. 

125-149, compares systems divided into two camps (bipolar) with systems with 

numerous power centers (multipolar), some of which may operate as coalitions, 

and some of which may be states standing apart from any coalitions. Standard 

contemporary textbooks reflect the confusion. For example, Joshua Goldstein’s 

International Relations, New York: Longman, 2003, p. 98-99, says that “In a 

multipolar system there are typically five or six centers of power, which are not 

grouped into alliances. Each state participates independently and on relatively 

equal terms with the others. . . . A bipolar system has two predominant states 

or two great rival alliances. . . . [A] unipolar system has a single center of power 

around which all others revolve.”

12. An early and widely-cited expression of the unipolar thesis was Charles 

Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs: America and the World 

1990/91, special issue, Vol 70, No. 1. See also Michael Mastanduno, “Preserving 

the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and Grand Strategy After the Cold War,” 

International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 1977, pp, 49-98.

13. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “American Primacy in 

Perspective,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4, July/August 2002. Despite the strain 

on U.S. military resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, the overwhelming U.S. military 

superiority is remains dramatic and unprecedented. 

14. For examples, see Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response 

to U.S. Primacy, New York: Norton, 2005. See also Seyom Brown, The Illusion of 

Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century, Washington, DC: Brookings 

Institution, 2003.

15. For additional discussion of how the characteristics and role of hegemonic 

powers affect the prospects for peace and war, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in 

International Politics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Stephen 

Krasner, “State and Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics, 

Vol. 28, No. 3, April 1976; and Timothy McKeown, “Hegemonic Stability Theory 

and 19th Century Tariff Levels in Europe,” International Organization, Winter 

1983.

16. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of the Great Powers, New York: Norton, 

2001.

17. For discussion of China’s power, ambitions, and problems, see Evan S. 

Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s New Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 

82, No. 6, November/December 2003, pp. 22-35. See also Thomas Christensen, 

“Posing Problems Without Catching Up: China’s Rise and Challenges for U.S. 

Security Policy,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 4, Spring 2001, pp. 5-40.
41

18. For analysis of Japanese interests and capabilities, see, for example, Eric 

Heginbotham and Richard Samuels, “Japan’s Dual Hedge,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 

81, No. 5, September-October 2002. An assessment of the prospects for a more 

assertive, even militarized Japanese diplomacy in reaction to what I call “polyarchy” 

appears in Eugene Matthews, “Japan’s New Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, 

No. 6, November-December 2003, pp. 74-90.

19. Seyom Brown, New Forces, Old Forces, and the Future of World Politics, New 

York: HarperCollins, 1995.

20. Polyarchy (a term coined by political scientist Robert A. Dahl to describe 

patterns of participation and opposition in domestic politics) is used here to 

denote a pattern of international relationships featuring many different kinds of 

actors—governmental and nongovernmental—characterized by a wide diversity 

of alignments and adversary relationships, subject to change issue-by-issue and 

lacking a dominant axis of cooperation and conflict. For Dahl’s original usage, see 

his Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 

1971. I first began to use the term to describe a possible post-Cold War international 

system in my New Forces in World Politics, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 

1974.

21. Cross pressures on and within the NATO did, of course, exist during the 

Cold War—most dramatically in the 1956 British-French-Israeli military assault 

on Egypt, surprising and angering the Eisenhower administration, followed by 

France acquiring its own nuclear arsenal and withdrawing from NATO’s military 

structure. But such fallings out were regarded as highly irregular and inconsistent 

with the imperative of maintaining unity against the common enemy and were, 

for the most part, diplomatically intercepted by the United States and squelched 

before any such public rupture. 

22. Robert E. Hunter, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO at the time, provides 

insight into Washington’s alarmist reactions to St. Malo in his book, The European 

Security and Defense Community: NATO’s Companion or Competitor, Santa Monica, 

CA: RAND, 2002, pp. 29-44.

23. Quoted in ibid., pp. 33-34. Emphasis added by Ambassador Hunter.

24. Ibid., pp. 34-44.

25. Various NATO papers on the “Framework Agreement” (including 

the background paper, “EU-NATO: The Framework for Permanent Relations 

and Berlin Plus,” n.d.); and the NATO Topics paper, “NATO-EU: A Strategic 

Partnership: How Did the Policy Evolve?” dated December 2, 2004.

26. Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 

September 30, 2001, p. 43. The need to adapt to the new reality of less reliable allies 

was forecast in 2000 by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century 

report, New World Coming, pp. 56-57:

The permanent stationing of U.S. forces abroad will become more 

difficult to sustain. The political cost of such bases will likely rise, as 
42

will the vulnerability of such forces to attack with ballistic missiles, 

cruise missiles, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction. The latter 

circumstance may erode support for such bases from the home front. 

Taken together, the pressures against the permanent forward basing of 

U.S. military forces have profound implications for U.S. strategy, power 

projection capabilities, and alliance relationships. 

27. Department of the Navy, 1999 Posture Statement: America’s 21st Century Force, 

Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1999. For an independent assessment of 

the implications of future problematical base availability for Navy force planning, 

see Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Buying ‘. . . From the Sea’: A Defense Budget for a Maritime 

Strategy,” in Cindy Williams, ed., Holding the Line: U.S. Defense Alternatives for the 

Early 21st Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 141-179.

28. Testimony of Chief Naval Officer Vern Clark before the Power Projection 

Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, July 15, 2005. Available 

at www.navy.mil.

29. Zalmay Khalilzad and Ian O. Lesser, “Conclusions and Implications for the 

U.S. Airforce of 2025,” in their edited volume, Sources of Conflict in the 21st Century: 

Regional Futures and U.S. Strategy, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1988, p. 

310.

30. Transformation Study Report: Transforming Military Operational Capabilities, 

Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 27, 2001.

31. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Testimony, Senate Arms Services 

Committee, September 23, 2004. Available at www.defenselink.mil/speeches.

32. Ibid.

33. “Who Needs Whom?” Economist, March 9, 2002, pp. 30-31.

34. SACEUR quote from NATO background paper, “The NATO Response 

Force: How did it evolve?” available at www.nato.int/issues/nrf/nrf, September 19, 

2005. 

35. NATO background paper, “The NATO Response Force: At the center of 

NATO transformation,” available at www.nato.int/issues/nrf/nrf, September 19, 

2005.

36. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, remarks to media en route to Berlin, 

September 12, 2005. Available at www.defenselink.mil/transcripts.

37. NATO background paper, “The NATO Response Force: What does this 

mean in practice?” September 19, 2005, available at www/nato.int/issues/nrf.

38. Carlotta Gall, “NATO to Expand Force and Task in Afghanistan,” New 

York Times, October 7, 2005.

39. Rumsfeld to media, September 12, 2005.

40. An appropriate model can be borrowed from Operation DESERT STORM in 

the 1991 Gulf War, which was run under a UN Security Council mandate allowing 

all necessary means, including military, to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, but 
43

left it up to the member countries to implement the mandate, meaning in that case, 

the United States and the coalition of the willing it could assemble to follow the 

U.S. lead. President Bush, at the time, wisely rejected the recommendation from 

Mikail Gorbachev to lodge responsibility for political direction of the war in the 

UN Security Council and Secretary General. 

41. See Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, 

New York: Norton, 2005. Even so-called “soft-balancing”—involving nonmilitary 

counters to the hegemon—has not manifested anything like a coherent anti-U.S. 

basis for putting together and sustaining a coalition. See International Security, Vol. 

30, No. 1, Summer 2005, for a scholarly debate over this concept. 

42. See Secretary Rumsfeld’s vocal complaints (quoted above) against national 

“caveats.” 

43. Such mandates to form a consensus when one does not exist (except in the 

most vague terms) can be a source of “caveat” problems where national military 

authorities attach their own interpretations and restrictions onto a presumably 

agreed-upon NATO plan, making for subsequent difficulties in coordinating 

operations. 

44. There was some sense after all to Secretary Rumsfeld’s frequently reiterated 

(and frequently criticized) dictum that “the mission determines the coalition, and 

the coalition must not determine the mission.” DoD News Briefing by Secretary 

Rumsfeld, U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, Washington, DC: The 

Pentagon, October 18, 2001. 

45. This kind of modularity (that perhaps can serve as a model for NATO’s 

own such devolutionary processes) is being instituted within the EU with respect 

to the formation and deployment of Rapid Response Battlegroups. See ESDP 

Presidency Report, endorsed by the European Council on December 17, 2004, 

available at www.europa.eu.int/pol/cfsp.