Rumsfeld v Powell: beyond good and evil

During my many travels to Europe over the past year, a familiar motif has played itself out. No sooner do I hit the tarmac than my hosts’ cheerful welcoming banter is followed by the first serious question: “who’s up and who’s down?” in the putative fight to the death being waged between the United States’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and its secretary of state, Colin Powell.

The question is not posed with equanimity. For all that Americans are charged with too often viewing the world as a simple clash between good and evil, this European concern has its own distinct moral subtext. In a cartoonish way, foreign observers often contrast the decent, honourable, mild-mannered, multilateralist Powell with an overbearing, rude, blunt, abrasive, arrogant, unilateralist Rumsfeld. This simplicism is a metaphor for how little the rest of the world really knows about the sole remaining superpower. It is also a fine place to start explaining the realities of post-9/11 America to the rest of the world.

It’s the ideas, stupid

The truth of the competition for the foreign policy soul of the Bush administration lies not in cliché but in history. Colin Powell is the champion of the realist school of thought, which has been prevalent in America since Alexander Hamilton convinced Congress to support the Jay Treaty with England in 1794. Realism, an ideology based above all else on furthering American national interests (it must be said by either unilateral or multilateral means), is as far from the cuddly Wilsonian idealism that many Europeans ascribe to Powell as it is possible to be.

Realists, moreover, do not share the fantasy (propagated by followers of the French president, Jacques Chirac) that we live in a “multipolar” world of three-to-five relatively equal powers. Realists currently see the power structure of the world as one where the United States is the chairman of the board, the first among equals. But if global problems are to be successfully addressed, other board members need to be engaged on an issue-by-issue, case-by-case basis. This hard-headed pragmatism – aeons away from foreign perceptions of Colin Powell as a closet European who somehow took a wrong turn and ended up in the Bush administration – is the true reason for Powell’s concern to carry allies along.

Also by John Hulsman on openDemocracy:

• “The violations of Gerhard Schröder” (December 2002)

• “Cherry-picking as the future of the transatlantic alliance” (February 2003)

• “A realist security strategy for the United States” (July 2003)

Europe’s judgment of Donald Rumsfeld as the repository of all that the rest of the world despises about America is equally flawed. A former ambassador to Nato, a Congressman, chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and now both the youngest and the oldest man ever to hold the position of defence secretary, Rumsfeld has been grappling with foreign relations issues for thirty years.

Indeed, as a staunch believer in the transatlantic alliance, Rumsfeld is far more a Washington operator than he is an ideologue, unlike neo-conservatives such as his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the thrusting hawks clustered around vice-president Dick Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. In fact, although “neo-conservative” is the current watchword for all that is malign in European eyes about the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it is an open question as to whether Rumsfeld is one at all.

Strict neo-conservatives see America as the new Rome, the only global power of significance in an otherwise dangerous and chaotic world. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous dictum, “the mission determines the coalition – the coalition does not determine the mission”, may not be music to the ears of European believers in the multipolar ideal; but it is far from the neo-conservative belief that pursuing coalitions is pointless.

Real drama, not soap opera

However, if foreign views of differences between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are exaggerated, they are correct about one fundamental truth: the Bush administration’s foreign policy is not monolithic. In fact, a titanic struggle between realists and neo-conservatives for control of the Bush administration and the Republican party is underway; and it is mirrored by the ideological battle within the Democratic party between traditionalist and harder-edged Wilsonians. America has not been in this much ideological ferment regarding foreign affairs since the Truman era after the second world war.

For more analysis and argument about United States foreign policy, see openDemocracy’s debates on American power & the world and The Bush doctrine: right or wrong

As was the case in 1945 with the doctrine of “containment” elaborated during the cold war to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union, it is likely that the emerging, dominant paradigm of American foreign policy will be a hybrid that fuses elements of all three schools of thought: realism, Wilsonianism, and neo-conservatism.

America is a nation in flux. The neocon ascendancy that sent United States troops into Iraq is less secure than it seemed a year ago. A historic clash between different foreign policy doctrines is taking place; “who’s up and who’s down?” is mere European soap opera in comparison. As Valentine, the lead character in Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play, Arcadia, says: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong.”