Jessee Incao

From: Switzer, Tom [switzert@theaustralian.com.au]

Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 3:40 AM

To: 'Jessee Incao'

Subject: thanks again

Dear Jessica:

Thanks again for your help with Dr Kissinger. As discussed, here's the feature on Joe Joffe.

Best regards, Tom

Feature

Superpower shake-up

Tom Switzer
MATP
1,598 words
5 August 2003
The Australian
1 - All-round Country
9

English
(c) 2003 Nationwide News Proprietary Ltd

He is no friend of the anti-American Left, but commentator Josef Joffe says US foreign policy is dangerously flawed if Washington tries to remake the world in its own image. Tom Switzer reports

HENRY Kissinger has called him "one of the most thoughtful writers on foreign policy" whose work is "indispensable to understanding European-American relations". Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man, suggests "his warnings about the uses of American power and the changes that it could bring to global politics are ones that should be taken seriously".

But several prominent government officials -- from Foreign Minister Alexander Downer to President George W. Bush's former defence adviser Richard Perle -- have dismissed his thesis that the US could provoke a counterbalancing coalition of states in the post-Soviet world. One leading Australian commentator has even called him anti-American.

As these strong and conflicting reactions indicate, Josef Joffe is a significant and controversial figure in the great foreign policy debates of the post-Cold War era.

A publisher-editor of German weekly Die Zeit and a regular contributor to Time, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest and The New York Times, Joffe is a European who knows the US intimately and, judging by the amount of time he spends there, seems to like it better than his native Germany.

He is in Australia this week to deliver the distinguished John Bonython Lecture. His message? Although the US is still No1 more than a decade after its Cold War victory, lesser actors -- Russia, Europe and China -- could make true what history and political theory have predicted all along: nos2, 3 and 4 will seek to balance against an increasingly assertive Mr Big. Or, as Joffe puts it, "Lilliputians" will gang up against "Gulliver" if the last remaining superpower continues to impose its will and leadership across the globe.

Like Kissinger, Joffe is a European-born and bred geopolitical strategist who has studied

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and taught at Harvard University. He's also one of Germany's few high-profile Jewish intellectuals. And like Kissinger in another era, Joffe is using academic forums and the popular press to challenge what he considers a dangerously flawed approach to US foreign policy. The US, he suggests, should play the Bismarckian game of power politics instead of pursuing a Wilsonian crusade to remake the world in America's image.

Joffe is no supporter of the Bush administration. ("There is nothing conservative about [neo-conservatism]; if anything, it is revolutionary, dedicated to changing the status quo around the world.") But neither is he a friend of the anti-American Left. During the Cold War, Joffe championed US containment of the Soviet empire and he believes history will vindicate Ronald Reagan for winning the East-West conflict.

As a proponent of realism, a doctrine with antecedents in 19th-century European balance-of-power politics, Joffe upsets the neo-conservative Right and the progressive Left. "Considering that the road to hell is paved with good intentions," he told The Australian last week, "how can you be anything else but a realist?" According to realists, a nation's goal should not be to impose its values all across the globe but to secure peace and stability through maintaining a balance of power among rival states. He says: "I think it was [historian] A.J.P. Taylor who once said: 'The statesmen of the 19th century unleashed unjust wars and killed thousands; those of the 20th conducted just wars and killed millions.'" Contrary to conventional wisdom, Joffe believes the great watershed of the postwar era was not September 11, 2001, but Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide by self-dissolution. Suddenly, Joffe remarks, the world was no longer bipolar but unipolar, no longer defined by the US-Soviet struggle but by the presence of a virtually unchallenged US hegemon.

"The Europeans felt more comfortable in the past with Gulliver bound, although it was nice to be able to untie him just in case the other superpower, the Soviet Union, turned nasty," he says. But that strategic dependence is more than a decade old and Joffe sees serious cracks emerging in US relations with western Europe.

For starters, lesser powers are increasingly using international institutions -- which the US does not dominate -- as a venue where they can "put the ropes back on Gulliver". Institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty, he says, are merely another form of classical balance-of-power politics. Joffe points to the months leading up to the Iraq war, when lesser powers sought to entangle Gulliver in the ropes of great power diplomacy. No German chancellor, he insists, would have openly defied Washington while Soviet troops were in his backyard. Nor would the French have brazenly vetoed US-led resolutions in the UN Security Council while depending on the free security provided by six US divisions in Germany.

Still, Joffe acknowledges that lesser powers are not doing to the US (yet) what they did to Napoleon in the early 19th century or to Stalin after World War II. Britain, Italy, Spain and several other western and eastern European states, remember, sided with the US-led "coalition of the willing" over France and Germany earlier this year.

But, warns Joffe, that doesn't mean America's rivals are content with US hegemony. However haphazardly and fitfully, this 800-pound gorilla does throw its weight around. And the global unrest over Washington's unilateral bullying over Iraq, suggests Joffe, may be a sign of things to come.

With the Soviet threat dead, he warns, the glue that has bound nations in alliance will come unstuck. Once allies no longer need to worry about their common enemy, they begin to worry about one another. Think of the anti-Napoleonic alliance and the entente against Wilhelm II of Germany, both of which collapsed within a few years of victory at Waterloo in 1815 and Versailles in 1919, respectively.

Not surprisingly, Joffe's thesis has drawn a critical response on both sides of the Pacific. Downer, among others, disputes the notion that victory in the Cold War has robbed alliances of their raison d'être. Australia, despite the collapse of Soviet communism, continues to share strong interests with the US, such as preserving East Asian security and combating the threat of global terrorism. "The ANZUS Treaty was invoked for the first time not during the Cold War but at the outset of the war on terrorism," Downer says.

The historical analogy between today's US and other global hegemons is risky, argues Perle. "The cases he cites are all ones in which the hegemon exploited its power in an

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aggrandising manner and, in so doing, posed a threat to others who banded together to contain that threat. Despite the rubbish whispered in [French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's Paris salon, no one whose intentions towards the US are benign considers us a threat to them -- although suggesting that we are a threat may be a useful political tactic in some countries where despots need an external enemy to maintain internal control." But Joffe has also won praise from a wide range of commentators.

"Joffe's great virtue is that he did not lose sight of the importance of power in international politics after the Cold War ended," says John Mearsheimer, a leading conservative realist at the University of Chicago. "Throughout the 1990s, most experts thought that world politics had undergone a fundamental transformation and that power politics and conflict had been burned out of the system for good. Peace and prosperity were our future. Joffe knew better and thus he was intellectually better prepared than his colleagues to understand world events in the wake of 9/11." JAMES Schlesinger, Richard Nixon's defence secretary, agrees with the Joffe thesis, citing "the historic tendency" of the great powers -- in this case, China, Russia and Europe -- "to cut a leader down to size".

And Scott Burchill, a lecturer in international relations at Melbourne's Deakin University, adds: "Current transatlantic tensions are more a response to US unilateralism and bellicosity than the end of a common security threat. France and Germany are fed up with Washington's fiats and believe they are too important to be ignored." Joffe agrees that the lesser powers won't take being bossed around by Washington for much longer. "The theory of unilateralism was famously proclaimed by [US Defence Secretary] Don Rumsfeld when he said, in so many words: 'The mission determines the coalition and not the other way round.' This well explains contemporary US policy. It is alliance a la carte, pick and choose, the coalition of the willing -- but not working with established institutions like NATO as a whole," Joffe argues. "Or take the second Iraq war. If the Security Council baulks, then you go to war by yourself plus Britain and an Australian contingent." All of which riles the souls of the lesser powers -- and rightly so, he insists.

"Other major powers will break ranks again unless the greatest power since Rome learns to respect a simple maxim: to lead is to heed," Joffe argues.

"As Gulliver learned, it is hard enough to live even as a friendly giant among the pygmies. It is even harder to escape their slings and arrows when the giant's strength is untempered by self-restraint."

Tom Switzer is the Opinion editor of The Australian. Josef Joffe delivers the 20th annual John Bonython Lecture in Sydney tonight.

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