Of America’s Dunkirk, Napoleon’s
Winter, and FDR’s Third Freedom. Roger Morris and Steve Schmidt evoke history, envision
political alternatives and offer a provocative reappraisal of national security
policy in a swiftly changing world

Strategic Demands of the 21^st
Century: A New Vision for a New World

In the spring of
2005, America
faces unprecedented challenges in national security.

The war on Iraq
is a strategic disaster. Unilateral
invasion and a bloody, profiteering, open-ended occupation have torn our
alliances, cost unparalleled international hostility and distrust, heightened a
still-misread, thus still-undeterred threat of terrorist vengeance, further
swollen a malignant budget deficit, strained US ground forces as never before,
and altogether drained and diverted the nation amid a host of other grave
problems. Added to America’s unremitting complicity with Arab
dictatorships and with an Israeli regime gone from self-defense to
colonization, subjugation and Berlin-wall apartheid
vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the debacle in Iraq compounds an escalating
crisis. The contrast between our
declared anti-colonial, democratic ideals and our conquest of Iraq is seen as flaunted hypocrisy
in our centuries-old image of standing for freedom and the downtrodden. We risk
an epochal change in the cultural belief systems of hundreds of millions, an
alienation from and hatred of America
for generations to come with incalculable consequences.

At the same moment, we must deal
with further threats to national security that can no longer be denied. With
Washington’s continuing countenance of a destabilizing nuclear arsenal in
Israel, thereby provoking one in Iran, playing geo-political Russian roulette
with another in a precarious Pakistan, and toying with yet another in North
Korea, the world confronts the most volatile arrays of nuclear danger since
Hiroshima. As if that were not enough,
we also face the planetary havoc of looming environmental disasters from
advancing or already irreversible global warming and resource depletion, the
prolonged crisis of peaking oil production and worldwide energy scarcity, and
the concurrent international instability igniting from inequities and abuses of
a rampant, exploitative globalism. These
multiple crises come, as never before, at a time of our own deepening economic
vulnerability, with enormous foreign-held debt, a record trade deficit, and an
irretrievably waning dollar altogether threatening a major loss of jobs, income,
productivity, national wealth, and standard of living.

All this also overtakes the United
States in a world where power is inexorably more plural and subtle, where
Washington’s hoary concept and means of national security, vested and clung to
at the expense of crucial pertinent needs, are obsolete and
counter-productive. Conventional
military might marshaled for a bygone era is ineffectual in most of today’s
tests, symbolized so graphically by the eight high-tech US divisions in Iraq
unable to keep the electricity and water on, or secure the road to the Baghdad
airport, much less the country from lightly armed insurgents whose forces and
supporters only multiply with the occupation.
Over seven hundred post-cold war US military bases dotting the earth—our
camo-archipelago carrying all the pretense and opprobrium of empire—are ironic
emblems of extraneous power and paradoxical impotence, in 21st-century
strategic terms, an American Maginot Line outflanked by political,
environmental and economic threats to national security.

As unprecedented as the crises we
face, the epic blindness and blunder of the current Republican Presidency and
Congressional regime—abetted by the political default of the Democratic
opposition—create and aggravate some dangers and negligently ignore
others. As proverbial generals in the
grip of irrelevant experience, swaggering into the next war preparing for the
last, both relic parties have rendered our foreign policy a reckless anachronism,
leaving America
effectively disarmed before grim menaces to peace and security.

No rescue will come within the usual
exchange of White House or Congress. The
failure is widely bipartisan, if especially jarring in the mythology and
crudity of a neo-conservative cabal.
Even if Democratic national security advisors magically acquired more
foresight and courage, they would be unlikely to effect significant change in
policy, so captive are politicians of both
parties to narrow, serve-at-any-price interests of corporate and wealthy
contributors and lobbies, the bottom-line politics and bondage that trump
ideology and all else. America remains so unresponsive to
the new challenges—the politics of foreign policy so corrupted and stifled, the
public so misled—that a great national debate on national security is itself an
urgent strategic imperative.

The
moment requires bold innovative approaches to our interests and
responsibilities on a drastically changed, swiftly changing planet. What we see
as essential to a wide-ranging democratic discussion and debate is a new
strategic discourse, addressing causes as well as effects. We must look ahead,
envision and plan without illusion or compromising influence, recognize new
realities, tell unpopular truths, put the national interest ahead of office,
educate and act.

This paper, the first in a series
outlining an alternative and comprehensive ‘national security’ vision, offers practical, constructive policies along
with essential changes in the democratic politics and governance of national
security that must accompany such an authentic, and historic, policy change.

Recognizing the necessity of the
first genuine reformulation of national security policy in over half a century,
we find ourselves “present at the creation” of the next era in world affairs
with the historic task of shaping the future with a new vision for a new world.

The New National Security Agenda

America’s strategic
challenges are three-fold: Geo-political,
-environmental and -economic. All have equal priority. All demand a renewal of
government—independent new thinking with far greater knowledge and sensibility
vis-à-vis the world at large, relevant new missions for diplomacy, intelligence
and the military, and an indispensable democratization of decision-making in
national security and related policy.

Geo-political:
The immediate necessity to break free of the pyrrhic war in Iraq and the
mutually ruinous complicity with Israel’s expansionist tragedy, and at the same
time to defuse sectarian terrorism at its source, stem clear and present
nuclear dangers, end our addiction to peaking foreign oil already intolerably
ransomed by lives as well as treasure, and altogether restore the integrity of
American foreign policy and the loss of international respect for our word and
purposes, a loss as lethal as any threat we face.

Geo-environmental: Urgent
planetary mobilization to meet the crises upon us from climate change,
ecosystem degradation, and resource exhaustion.
In ice and thaw, flood and drought, famine and disease, the predictable
collapses and social-economic disruptions from environmental reckonings will
plague continents with domestic upheavals and international armed
confrontations, what a Pentagon study calls “a world of warring states,” as
threatening and likely as any military or terrorist strike. As with those other attacks, environmental
blows may come abruptly, or over time.
However, unlike human threats,
which statesmanship may avert, some ecological onslaught is now
inevitable. We must cope immediately with
attacks already underway, as well as reversing the reversible, preventing or
defending against future assaults.

Geo-Economic:
To deal with twin curses of the
recent decades’ strategically obtuse corporate globalism and Washington’s
suborned trade policies—the turmoil inherent within and among nations the
global economy has left so deeply and dangerously divided between rich and
poor, and the debility and distortions of America’s once-dominant middle class
economy. Strategically, America must
re-secure its equitable economic future among richer, more competitive, yet
mutually dependent nations, in a new world where economic democracy and
sustainability are as vital as growth, where no future is secure when six
billion people crowd smoking slums around shrinking walled enclaves of wealth.

New Policies

The national
security actions outlined below combine the most effective, still-relevant
elements of America’s
traditional policies with creative responses to unique new challenges. The underlying commitment
to idealism is the hardheaded realism of the new era—the understanding that
principle and national interest are no longer at odds, as it seemed so often
the case during the Cold War, and that the realities of the 21st century make
principles pragmatic, ideals not only affordable but essential.

Broadly, alternative policy rests on
three tenets of political, military, and economic security:

Political
security through a policy of mutual respect, rights under law, and
political accommodation aimed at international relations free of dominance,
manipulation or unilateralism by any power, a world in which no nation or group
needs or turns to violent redress.

Military
security through the proven practice of collective security in which
nations share the burdens of peacekeeping, and America is protected as much by the
reciprocal loyalty of its alliances, the creativity of its diplomacy, the
strength of its ideals and the integrity of its international practices, as by
any arms or resort to military means it may reserve.

Economic
security through dedication to a shared prosperity with economic justice in
which all nations have a stake and none seeks dominance, unfair advantage or
exploitation.

It bears repeating that the threats to
national security require a thorough reexamination and redefining of our
international role and responsibilities, including comprehensive new approaches
in the executive, Congress, bureaucracy, journalism, policy research, and among
the public at large. This demands an
unprecedented educational effort and genuine ‘Great Debate’ among the American
people about the realities of the new century, about authentic democracy abroad
and in policy-making at home, and a global perspective and sensibility informed
in the first instance by a searching look at ourselves, particularly as others
see us.

We must face up honestly and
courageously to the concerted actions and impact of the United States in the
Middle East, Latin and South America, Asia and elsewhere over past decades, an
often shadowy history many in the world live with and understand all too well,
yet one that few Americans know or feel.

To
secure America’s
future means coming to terms with the past as well as the present.

The new
policies in summary:

I
America’s Dunkirk

In the spring of
1940, in a feat of political-military leadership and national effort, an Allied
army of more than 300,000 escaped a deadly trap on the English Channel coast of
France, and went on to regroup for battles that won the war. Meeting today’s national security challenges
begins with a 21^st-century Dunkirk, America’s breaking out of
entrapment in Iraq, alliance with Saudi Arabia and imbalance with
Israel—strategic flanking moves necessary for the crucial struggles ahead.

Freeing
us from the trap of Iraq. At once to
drain the Iraqi insurgency of legitimate nationalist support, prevent civil war
and preserve national unity, restore Iraq’s
sovereignty and self-government and bring America
back into compliance with international law, all first steps to reclaim our
standing among nations, the US
would:

· Begin immediate
withdrawal, to be completed within months by a date certain, of all 150,000+ US
troops along with some 20,000 civilian contractors, including closure of the
fourteen or more permanent US military bases planned—the occupation to be
replaced by a temporary multinational peacekeeping and support force under the
auspices of the United Nations in collaboration with the Arab League and the
Organization of the Islamic Conference.

· Renounce all
post-invasion US corporate
acquisitions of Iraq’s
oil and other property, including any enabling occupation regime edicts, with
control of all national assets reverting to Iraqis.

· Recognizing that
January 2005 elections under US and insurgent guns were fatally flawed, link
our withdrawal with new free and fair post-occupation Iraqi elections under
international supervision, aimed at the authentic self-governance and workable
balance of constituent interests missing in the truncated, occupation-tainted
regime.

· Lead an
international consortium of reconstruction aid for Iraq,
repairing the gaping wounds from the US war and prior sanctions, and
from Saddam Hussein’s pillaging tyranny, itself instigated and enabled in part
by more than three decades of covert and overt US support.

·
Face realistically the strategic toll of the Bush regime debacle
in Iraq—that our occupation has fed the creation of at least some highly
trained, strongly motivated cadres in Iraq who may well endure elsewhere as a
hostile, anti-American force regardless of the country’s liberation, that
despite our departure and international diplomatic and economic efforts, Iraq
may become a failed state and center of resurgent anti-American hostility in
the Middle East, and that our calamitous policy has eroded the credibility and
capacity of the United States to deal multilaterally with those and other
potential threats. A new national
security policy repairing the enormous damage of past policy would pursue
creative new diplomatic and multilateral military planning to deal with these
contingencies.

Breaking
out of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian tragedy.
America would urgently pursue the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces
and colonists from the West Bank and Gaza and establishment there of a viable
sovereign Palestine, guaranteeing the security of the borders of both Israel
and Palestine, and with Jerusalem’s multicultural status and the full civil
rights of Arab citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens of Palestine assured by
both states and an international monitoring presence.

·
To Israel
- we would pledge, by treaty and a joint resolution of Congress, that any
invasion of its pre-1967 territory would be equivalent to an attack on the US,
obliging our full defense. We would urge
other powers to join that guarantee.
With or without others, however, America’s commitment to a just and
lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace would be unequivocal. If Israel
failed to withdraw forces and provide for colonists to return, it would be the US position that dispossession of the
Palestinians is a multiple threat to the peace, our principled support since
1947 does not extend to a geo-political mutual suicide pact, and in refusing to
act responsibly, Israel
will be sanctioned like any other international obstructer.

·
To Palestine - America would pledge our matching commitment to
the establishment and integrity of a viable independent state, in return for an
immediate end to terrorism and all other violence against Israel and Israelis. As with Israel’s failure to withdraw, continued
Palestinian hostilities would bring US sanctions.

·
America would lead an
international consortium to build a new Middle East
commonwealth—adama tziburit in
Hebrew, al-tharwa al-oumoumiya in
Arabic, the ancient concept of a shared land and resources, economic and
spiritual. Our aim is not only to
provide essential aid to Palestine,
enabling the small crowded state to move from bitter dispossession to a stake
in peace. The commonwealth concept also
recognizes an emerging strategic-demographic reality of the region—that the
Jewish population of Israel
is in relative decline, and that its long-term security and prosperity lies in
an internationally backed peaceful economic integration rather than as a
dwindling master minority holed up in some doomed, walled apartheid.

·
The US
would convoke through the UN a Middle East
demilitarization conference, nuclear and conventional, beginning with our
honest acknowledgement of Israeli nuclear weapons. On the precept of "trust but
verify" and with deep transparency, the aim is to prevent the further
proliferation of nuclear weapons in Iran or any regional nation—albeit
recognizing that this security can only be assured in the end by the
statesmanship of Israel, on the South African model, in relinquishing for the
cause of peace its ever-destabilizing Samsonesque nuclear arsenal.

Meeting
the now-neglected challenges of terrorist vengeance, other nuclear dangers, and
our hostage energy supply.

Following from breakthroughs in Iraq,
Israel and Palestine, a new national security policy
would also:

·
Address repressive Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere. In policy consistent with principle worldwide
as well as in the Middle East, we would cease all military, political and
economic support of regimes deemed undemocratic by universal standards,
including all intelligence aid and collusion, and while accepting trade and
investment of direct benefit to the mass of people in those nations, actively
discourage corporate and other private complicity with tyrannical
governments. Scrupulously avoiding overt
or covert intervention in any country, the US would clearly declare and
observe moral support of democratic movements and developments. While understanding that we have neither the
right nor wisdom to interfere in the politics of another nation, that its
destiny is the affair only of its own people, our foreign policy with respect
to democracy and tyranny would follow as much as possible the simple ancient
ethic of medicine—do no harm.

With the freeing from entrapment in Iraq, Israel-Palestine and repressive Arab
regimes, and complementary energy and economic strategies outlined below, we
would begin at last to contest forces such as al-Qaeda at the source of their
impetus by dramatically ceasing US
participation, direct or indirect, in the torment of their people by regimes in
the Middle East and elsewhere. In cultural terms, we would start to retell
the story of who we are in the world, changing that narrative by acts as well
as words—from a hypocritical, profit- and consumption-driven, interventionist,
militarist America, the people the 9/11 hijackers and others believe they are
counter-attacking, to the anti-colonial champion of freedom America once
represented around the globe. We would
retell that story not because we were forced to, or because it was expedient,
but because it was right, because it was
who we are, if given the chance to
make and conduct a truly democratic foreign policy

·
In breaking out of Iraq, we turn to a less visible snare in
Afghanistan, where smaller but ever-vulnerable Pentagon and CIA forces battle
in a Great Game entanglement with an untenable regime seen as our puppet, a
still potent Taliban resistance, the ever-hovering Pakistanis furtively
supporting all sides with the aim of the permanent weakness if not full
subservience of Afghanistan, and Afghan drug lord-warlords who hold the balance
of power in that tragic narco-colony.
New policy would stop all collusion and temporizing with the local
mafias and drug trade, replace US forces with peacekeeping from countries
genuinely neutral in the area’s tortuous politics, muster international support
to end Pakistani interference, renounce all interest in corporate exploitation
of Afghan resources or territory for oil transit, and fulfill the unmet promise
of decisive international aid to enable an independent, non-sectarian Afghan
regime to survive, and eventually to break the hold of the opium warlords.

·
Deal comprehensively and with unprecedented seriousness with
nuclear dangers in Pakistan and North Korea as well as in Israel and Iran, and
give nuclear arms reductions and control the compelling priority it must have
in America’s policy toward its own and other great power arsenals.

In Pakistan, we
face the toll of a half-century of our heedless patronage and evasion that has
left a now ungoverned, now ungovernable state whose corrupt “black” economy
dominated by the drug trade rivals or surpasses its open one, and where a
military regime with notoriously insecure nuclear technology and weaponry sits
uncertainly atop a seething sectarian atavism.
Among its highest priorities, a new national security policy would: organize international action to
begin to deal with Pakistan’s virulence, bring some balance to the country’s
economy, aggressively pursue regional arms control measures with India, shore
up Pakistani strategic command and control and export controls over nuclear
technology, make any future cooperation with Pakistan contingent on rigorous
transparency, and encourage democratic elements in the country in every
legitimate and open manner. A crisis
waiting to happen, what many knowledgeable observers have called “the most
dangerous nation state in the world,” there is no more chilling example than Pakistan of the mistaken priorities and
diversion suffered in the war on Iraq.

With North
Korea—an impasse produced by serio-quixotic efforts by the Bush regime to overthrow the Pyongyang government
and to use North Korea, like Taiwan, as a pawn in a dangerous playing-off of a rearmed Japan against an emerging
China—a new policy would fulfill
long-standing US trade and international aid promises to North Korea in return for verified abandonment of its nuclear weapons program and ending of all
further exports of missile technology
to Pakistan, Iran and other countries, an exchange the North Koreans have repeatedly pledged, and a bargain by any
measure.

These initiatives would come as well with urgent new
approaches to our own nuclear arsenal that would maintain the necessary level
of deterrence against organized regimes—an adequate minimum of 250 to 500
warheads—while reinvigorating an international movement to completely eliminate
nuclear weapons, these anachronistic, apocalyptic relics of a vanished era.
Placing nonproliferation and disarmament on top of the international
agenda, including urgent support of UN efforts to revive expiring non-proliferation
treaty obligations, US would forge ahead of Russia and
other powers in reducing both strategic and conventional arms and setting
a timetable for verified demilitarization.
Among the first acts of a new strategic policy would be to remove America’s nuclear deterrent from the hair
trigger status that still, incredibly, more than a decade after the fall of the
USSR
and end of the cold war, leaves us 20 minutes from nuclear holocaust by chance
or craze. We would also recognize that
our commitment toward nuclear disarmament, not proliferation of new generation
of nuclear weapons, would act as a powerful incentive for nations such as Pakistan and North
Korea, Israel
and Iran,
to adopt the sane strategic policies we seek of them. As part of that commitment, we would also
pledge to the international community that there would be no new deployment of
the next generation of America’s
ominous new “useable” nuclear weaponry or space-based delivery systems, which
the world rightly deplores and fears, especially in light of the Bush regime’s
reckless posturing of unilateral preemptive war. Security in the 21^st century
begins with the understanding that nuclear arms carry the inevitability of
eventual catastrophe, and that America
will never be truly safe until we move beyond these suicidal weapons and the
fear and ignorance behind them.

We would recognize that conventional arms also consume our
common future. With reconversion
provision for affected industries, the US would
cease trafficking in more than fifty percent of the world's munitions—America in 2005 the world’s leading
merchant of death.
We would stop giving or loaning more than $100 billion in a vast
munitions industry subsidy for poor countries’ military purchases, and press Russia
to embargo its share of the two-thirds of the arms trade we conduct together. On a planet where poorer countries squander
tens of billions a year on weapons, America would shed old military
clients and quarantine arms merchants as we once checked fascist and
Communist aggressors, conducting an all-out collective effort to
demilitarize worldwide by agreements with developing nations to forgive
debt in return for substantial conversion of military sectors to peaceful
development along with strict inspection of arms reductions.

·
Not least, essential to any new national security
strategy would be a public acknowledgment of the extent of politicization of America’s
intelligence. “Intelligence and facts
are being fixed around the policy,” MI-6 head Richard Dearlove reported on the
CIA and other US intelligence agencies to Prime Minister Tony Blair in a
recently leaked secret document from the July 2002 run-up to the war on
Iraq. The outrage of national
intelligence, the very lifeblood of national security, being suborned by the
bullying pressures of politicians and ideological zealots, and by the
bureaucrats’ willful complicity or supine surrender, have shocked many watching
the Bush foreign policy disasters. This
corruption and disgrace is only the latest in a history of compromises of the
CIA and its lesser Washington
rivals, increasingly inept, misadventured and anachronistic since the 1980s. A new national security policy must address a
larger “treason of the clerks” embodied in manipulation of intelligence for
political purpose.

To begin that reform, a new strategy
would include a presidential executive order that intelligence officials of all
agencies are to maintain the integrity of their work product scrupulously free
of any interference by political appointees, and to report any apparent
pressure or suborning to a joint Executive-Congressional oversight body on
Intelligence Ethics established to preserve and protect their substantive
independence. New policy would also
pursue strict statutory protections for the independence of the intelligence
community, with criminal penalties for attempted corruptions.

At the same time, we would recognize
that no structural safeguards can adequately address deeper flaws of
institutions or the culture of bureaucracy, and new, relevant, effective
national security would depend on a sweeping reinvigoration of the ranks and
leadership of national intelligence, including much wider collaboration and
transparency with academic and other independent sectors (in a field in which
the necessary secrets are minimal), and the adoption of institutional rules
within the CIA and other agencies allowing and rewarding dissent, policing
retaliations, and generally nurturing a culture of intellectual integrity and
excellence. Finally, a new strategy
would dismiss the bogus reforms of a national intelligence Tsar and encourage
instead the healthy open competition and collaboration of disparate if
sometimes repetitive agencies and missions, realizing that the range of views
and coverage in intelligence is far more important than any bureaucratic
efficiency. The CIA’s role as the chief
clearinghouse of national intelligence—with espionage and certainly covert
action functions severely circumscribed for special interest-special pleading bureaucratic
domains like the Defense Intelligence Agency—would be reestablished under
Congressional oversight and active scrutiny.

Accompanying
all these policies would be an urgent mobilization to end our vastly fraught
dependence on foreign oil—not alone because its ransoming is
politically and militarily disastrous, or its fuel environmentally ruinous, but
to recognize and act on the now imminent
peaking of oil production and an inevitable global energy scarcity, already
visible in oil industry data showing the relentless depletion of existing reserves and a worldwide decline in new
discoveries, already felt in rising US gas prices and a fall in consumer
spending. With little prospect that
under current conditions and priorities alternative sources of energy—hydrogen,
solar, wind, biomass, geothermal or other systems—will develop rapidly or
plentifully enough to replace emptying oil, we face the prospect of a
devastating global energy shortage in decades if not sooner. To meet the emergency, a new policy would
institute a comprehensive new national crash program of energy conservation,
including much higher fuel efficiency standards for all vehicles, on the
Norwegian model significant new taxes on gas guzzling vehicles, and massive
funding of research, development, and full-scale production of alternative,
largely renewable energy sources with no net carbon emissions. Beyond domestic realignment, we would pursue
worldwide conservation, conversion, and coordinated management of scarcities and imbalances that threaten
international instability and pose an obvious collateral danger to our national
security.

Even with these steps, however, we
would recognize that the nation and world face significant economic hardship
and hazardous international turmoil because of the compromise and myopia of
political leadership on this issue. Of
all the past and current folly in national security policy, none is more
blatant—nowhere is the political bankruptcy of both old parties plainer—than in
the failure to confront vested interests to prepare for the crisis of peaking
oil that has been predicted with bleak accuracy for over three decades.

II
Napoleon’s Winter

On a gray September
dawn in 1815, commanding his Grand Armée
of a half million that had defeated every martial foe, Napoleon rode in triumph
to the gate of the Kremlin. Three months
later, overcome by ravages of a startlingly severe winter and an unexpected
loss of stores in the burning of Moscow, the
Emperor and the ragged remnant of his force, many reduced to eating their own
frozen, cut-off fingers, staggered back across Europe
in historic defeat. It was not the only
time, of course, that physical conditions and lack of strategic foresight
doomed a great power, and the lesson is clear.
Today, America
faces a 21^st-century version of Napoleon’s winter: the still largely unplanned-for
imminence of environmental upheaval.

At the end of March
2005, the prestigious Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, drawing on twenty-two national
science academies and echoing the recent Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, confirmed
authoritative scientific findings of the widespread environmental degradation
at hand and the prospect of local and regional ecological and economic-social
collapses in the decades immediately ahead.
As the world’s scientists have warned for some time, the study foresaw
not only gradual, relentless change, but also sudden and irreversible decline,
with a half dozen potential “tipping points” into conditions beyond recovery on
a human timescale. “We can reverse the
degradation of many ecosystems over the next fifty years,” the Assessment
observed hopefully, and then added, “but the changes in policy and practice
required are substantial and not currently underway.”

For national security, it is no longer a question of
whether climate change and a host of other human abuses and “re-engineering” of
the earth will take a life-changing toll on ours and future generations—only
where, when, in what form, at what cost, and with what permanence. In terms of Napoleon’s winter, the cold has
already descended and Moscow
begun to burn. Unlike the folly of 1812,
however, we know in advance what we face.
It is as if Napoleon had seen the snow and flames, and his retreat, before he crossed into Russia.

In meeting the Geo-environmental challenge, the US would no
longer be a scofflaw or laggard in environmental action, so largely the captive to
narrow special interests putting ephemeral short-term profits, personal
enrichment and career advance ahead of the well-being and security of
generations. America would see through the old
fraud of posing the policy question as the environment versus business,
protecting nature vs. keeping jobs. We
would recognize that we must serve both or we will have neither, that we cannot
maintain our own way of life without caring for the life of the earth. “The overriding
conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human
societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the
planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all,”
the Millennium Assessment concluded.
“Achieving this, however, will require radical changes in the way nature
is treated at every level of decision-making.”
Understanding that the interests of our planet, our prosperity,
our national security, are indivisible, we would be dedicated to reversing the
reversible in ecological degradation, and minimizing the effects of ecological
wounds inflicted, including:

·
Concerted national policy to plan for the
economic, social, and other dislocations from changes in climate, ocean levels,
and the collapse of ecosystems; requirements
that natural costs/true cost pricing be taken into account in economic
decisions at every level; new methods
and intensity of cooperation on environmental policy between government,
business, and civil society; significant
new investments public and private in technologies relevant to problems of
degradation; by statute and persuasion,
sustained changes in behavior aimed at increased production in some fields,
decreased consumption in others, but all guided by a fundamental reappraisal of
the vulnerability of the world’s resources.
Beyond the conservation central to the new strategic energy policy,
overriding national priorities would include stricter emission controls and
decisive reduction of carbon dioxide (in which the US is by far the world’s
leading polluter) altogether to reduce greenhouse gases as never before,
adopting bold new technologies for hazardous-waste clean-up, aggressive
policies of resource replenishment, and myriad other measures.

·
Internationally, while joining and building on
the Kyoto Protocol, the US would go well beyond to institute and lead a Global
Environmental Alliance, a representative world organization to draft the
necessary new treaty agreements, and monitor national and international
environmental action with a planetary perspective on crisis and response,
politics and technology, including dangerous imbalances in resources,
strengthening of UN-assisted environmental standards enforcement in developing
countries and significant international fines to stop lax enforcement-shopping
corporations from polluting and poisonous exploitation of poor nations. Following on initiatives for sustainable
living in which Europe far surpasses the US, the Alliance would plan
coordinated policies decades ahead to deal with economic, social, and potential
political effects of environmental change already likely, as well as to counter
probable threats. Moreover, this new
environmental collective security would serve US interests generally. Abroad and at home, American technology would
enjoy a natural advantage in the intensive mobilization to defend against
ecological degradation, opening major new avenues for science and business,
redressing our malignant trade imbalance, and coping with natural disasters, as
shown so dramatically in the Indian Ocean Tsunami. An environmental Alliance defending security
on a broad front also offers a rejuvenating and relevant new mission to a US
military, whose trillion-dollar structural dysfunctions have been so
graphically exposed by its misuse in the war in Iraq, and whose dedicated ranks
could then bring their esprit de corps, training and technology to heal and to
build in true defense of their nation.

In
a larger sense, a new vision for a new world would see Geo-environmental
strategy intimately related to meeting other crises. Respecting the limits imposed by nature and
at the same time ensuring continued, sustainable economic progress that
fortifies and sustains peace, US
policy would build a far more equitable economy domestically and globally.

III The
Third Freedom

               In January 1941, with Europe overrun by Hitler and Britain reeling under the blitz, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a special address to Congress on still-neutral America’s foreign policy.  “In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he began, speaking of freedom of speech and religion and from fear of aggression.  

               Yet it was the third freedom FDR championed that moved millions then and later:  “Freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world,” FDR told them.  “That is no vision of a distant millennium.  It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”  Sixty-four years later, that vision is still unrealized, and its fulfillment more essential than ever to our security.

Over the past six
decades, the US
wielded power and economic dominance to erect a structure of world trade and
finance while proffering billions in aid and loans to developing nations, all
in the name of ensuring our international economic future. As in much else, however, policy and
leadership went tragically wrong. As
profiteering corporate globalism seized power in Washington
and swept American jobs and productivity abroad to the cheapest bidder, the
same forces set off an international race to the bottom in environmental and
labor standards, enriching the few at the expense of the many both in the US and
around the world.

After a half
century of America’s global economic dominance, we live on a planet where there
persists an immense exploitation and exclusion of the poor by the rich; where there is still a vast transfer of
wealth from developing nations to the affluent;
where babies of the destitute are grown on farms to provide organ
transplants for the wealthy, eleven million children die every year, and there
are two hundred new corpses each minute in what the World Health Organization
calls a "silent genocide" of preventable famine and disease; where six billion people still lack what
President Roosevelt called “a healthy peacetime life” and thus a stake in peace
itself; where poverty and privilege,
injustice, corruption and economic as well as political oppression store up the
ultimate sure harvest of hatred, hopelessness, demagoguery, terrorism and
war.

We live in an era,
too, when America’s unchallenged economic dominance is over, when by some
measures of wealth other nations and regions will soon be our peers, China and
India grow to surpass us at mid-century, all while a $600 billion trade deficit
and a $7.7 trillion budget deficit grow voraciously to devour the hopes of
millions of Americans. If much of
globalism’s recent boom has been on the backs of the old poor, its unchecked
future threatens to ride as well on the backs of a new poor among America’s
former middle class.

To secure our
economic progress and place in the new world of national economic equals we
must deal urgently and comprehensively with economic inequities that mock
democracy at home and stability abroad.
We would understand that security depends not only on a dynamic domestic
economy but on the well-being of all nations.
America
cannot address domestic needs and then later turn to the world's anguish. Either we begin to heal both, just as we must
reconcile the interests of environment and business, or it may well not matter
for our grandchildren if we keep ourselves prosperous. In meeting the Geo-economic challenge:

·
America would promote at every turn worldwide reinvestment
in human capital, in education, jobs and land reform in developing nations,
including a reversal of the crude, corporate interest-driven policies and
practices of the World Bank and other international financial organizations, an
encouragement of small-scale development programs and banks under local
democratic control and tailored to authentic local needs apart from propagating
globalism’s exploitive markets and, not least, the major turn from our $66
billion weapons trade and the channeling the fortunes now spent on world arms to
the high dividend investment in international economic justice and thus the lasting
peace that justice alone can bring.

·
Where national security policy merges most visibly with the
domestic agenda, we would respond to a multipolar world with international
trade and domestic industrial policies as concerted as was our commitment in
the Cold War, settling for neither belligerent blocs nor politely masked
inequity but rather will seek an equitable, politically sustainable world
commerce of shared sacrifice, responsibility and opportunity for capital and
labor.

·
Gauging the mercantilist policies of our
partner-competitors, their discipline of capital as well as labor, we would
mount a comprehensive new public investment strategy in the United States,
promoting a new preparedness economically, educationally and fiscally. Adding an essential new word to the old
formula, America’s
international commercial policy for the 21^st century would be Fair
Free Trade, with a new political-strategic sensibility brought to the
management of domestic markets and international businesses, preventing the
exploitation of people and the environment at home and abroad as a matter of indivisible
national interest.

·
We would renegotiate, as necessary, America's international
economic future with trade policies not merely to serve multinational business
profits but the nation as a whole,
including prudent tariffs to protect US workers and jobs no less than
financial interests, active economic diplomacy to ensure that China and other
Asian nations allow their currencies to appreciate to reduce the ominous US
trade deficit and avert a worldwide financial crisis, and urgently needed
changes in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North American Free
Trade Agreement with Mexico, and similar pacts compromised and corrupted by
corporate interests, allowing supranational trade agreements to erode US labor
and environmental standards. We would
not exploit the false specter of a trade war only to inflict a class war on
American and foreign workers.

There are all these challenges and
still others: The potential for a
new Sino-Japanese power rivalry the Bush regime has recklessly sought to
exploit; The danger of America’s own
renewed hostility toward both a surging China and inevitably recovering Russia; Washington’s old entanglement in drug wars
and reactionary resistance to nascent democratic regimes in Latin America; Embroilment with dubious new oil clients in
Africa and Central Asia; And not least,
the disarray of a Pentagon straining with inadequate manpower and equipment to
fight Iraqi and Afghan insurgents at $500 billion a year (a budget, even
adjusted to inflation, far more than at the height of Vietnam and the Cold War)
while sclerotic service baronies cling to antique systems and spent missions
irrelevant to 21^st-century conflicts and unfunded future procurement
liabilities run to more than a trillion dollars. In all these new approaches to national
security, we should be under no illusion about the breadth and depth of the
task of changing policy, or the powerful resistance politically and
bureaucratically.

IV Great
Debate

American foreign
policy has lost its way, and America
and her friends are losing the historic opportunity for lasting security in the
new century. The blatant militarism,
unilateralism and post-9/11 demagoguery and deceptions of the Bush
regime—flouting law, alliances and treaties, defying democracy and
long-established principles of the country’s international conduct—comprise
altogether the most acute crisis the nation has ever faced in the politics of
foreign policy. The toll is not only
embroilment in two misguided wars of incalculable cost and the unprecedented
distrust and hostility of most of the world, but also the fostering of an
authoritarian garrison state at home and a predatory proto-imperialism
abroad—leading to a politically and ultimately militarily ruinous isolation,
growing economic inequity and instability threatening US interests on every
continent, and, not least, a moral disaster for an America that was once, and
might still be again, Jefferson’s “last best hope of mankind.”

Yet the crude abuses of the Bush
Presidency—the usurping of power by a small cabal of fanatic right-wing
extremists—are only the most dramatic manifestations of a deeper crisis. The veritable Bush coup d’etat in foreign policy is part of a continuing bipartisan decline
since the end of the Cold War in 1991, a growing conceptual and political
vacuum in the foreign policy approach of both major parties that will not be
remedied by the succeeding of George W. Bush by any of the potential 2008
Democratic candidates, whose policies and policy-makers are only marginally
different. A
first, most basic demand of new strategy goes to the heart of policy-making in
a democracy. Americans must engage at
last the Great Debate that both Republicans and Democrats and their too largely
interchangeable foreign affairs “experts” have so negligently evaded since
9/11, beginning with that fateful emblematic event itself. The planes of that stark morning came
screaming out of history. In the day’s
ruins was much of American foreign policy.
Yet the conventional, preponderant political dialogue has cravenly
failed even to discuss that reality, much less come to grips with how much the
past holds hostage the present. Crude
partisan exploitation of 9/11 has not only dangerously distorted the issue of
dealing with terrorism, but also eclipsed the far graver risks arising at the
same time. At every level, local to
national, serious democratic discussion and debate should now probe the origin
and meaning of the attacks, weigh the history of American policy that has
shaped so much of our world, and go on to the new challenges before us.

Among much else, that debate would
enable us to see clearly that our national security policy is no longer
relevant abroad because it has long since ceased to be informed or remotely
democratic at home. It would be
difficult enough to overcome purely conceptual failures or ignorance of
civilian and military bureaucrats and the clan of foreign policy advisors whose
sham authority has filled the vacuum left by Congressional, media and public
abdications in policy-making. Like
old-fashioned courthouse reporters, those who would understand and reform
American national security policy in the 21^st century must more than
ever also follow the money, to the multiple corruptions of profit and career
that hold conviction hostage.

To take one of the more relevant
examples, rescuing US policy from the Israeli-Palestinian trap would mean not
simply or even mainly “persuading” the overwhelming bipartisan majority in the
executive and Congress now so bound to backing Israel’s disastrous course, but
breaking the grip of the pro-Israel lobby with its formidable financial and
other power, more persuasive than any substantive analysis, to punish and
reward its captive politicians at the polls and in the vital give-and-take,
go-along to get-along, of Washington politics.
A decisive majority in Congress must not only know the right course in national security and foreign policy; it
must be able to afford supporting it. Democratizing national security policy means
democratizing American politics as never before, a task required to ensure not
only the survival of our system of government, but also, in the new national
security challenges of the 21^st century, our survival as a nation.

A New Vision

In a field known
for its arcane and complex concepts, a new vision of America’s national security is
unconventionally simple:

An
America
secure and prosperous because it understands and cares for the world around it. An
America that faces its own part in a painful past and trying present, as well
as its responsibility for a more just, peaceful and equitable future.

An America
that values its friends and knows its enemies, including their impermanence.

An America
that entrusts policy-making to the widest public, knowing that the nation’s
deepest ideals of freedom are also the principles that must govern its
relationship with other nations.

This
brief paper only begins to outline, of course, some of the issues that must be
addressed in a new, thoroughly democratic dialogue on national
security that America
must now commence. The policy changes summarized above encompass and
raise a host of other urgent questions:

·
How would the
new approaches specifically reapportion a newly integrated
trillion-dollar national security budget?

·
How would old
missions be revised, forces made leaner and more relevant, and a military
establishment retrained politically as well as militarily, both to meet
the real security challenges of a changed world and to stem the
professional military's increasingly evident and ominous alienation from
American society and traditional values of military subordination to civilian
authority?

·
What are the
Constitutional dimensions of a new vision of national security and foreign
relations, in which no other nation would have a veto over America's national
defense, but no President would have the power to commit US
forces to any hostile military action without full disclosure of the justifying
intelligence and full and open public and Congressional debate leading to a
formal Declaration of War? And how must the public dialogue, the media,
and Congress itself be reformed to fulfill that responsibility?

· Not least, how would a redefined national security define its own terms—
the conditions to be met by what is deemed a clear and present danger to the
national security, the truly vital interests of the nation affecting the safety
and survival of its people at large, as apart from lesser advantages of the few
and their narrow interests?

All these issues and many more must now enter the national
dialogue in a deep, deliberative, sustained democratic debate.

A
new vision for a new world will require the most comprehensive rethinking
of foreign policy and national security, of America and its role in the world,
we have ever undertaken as a people. If we are to be a free and secure
society in the 21^st century, the moment demands nothing less.

Green Institute / GP360

May 2005

Roger Morris, who served on the
National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, is
a Senior Fellow of the Green Institute and an investigative journalist and
historian whose work has won the National Book Award Silver Medal and numerous
other honors. He is just completing Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US policy and covert interventions in the Middle
East and South Asia over the past
half-century, forthcoming from Alfred Knopf.

Steven Schmidt was a key drafter of the founding platform of
the US
Green Party. He served as a chair of the national platform committee from
1995 to 2001 and co-drafted the first “Common Ground” platform between the
Association of State Green Parties and European Federation of Green Parties. An
emeritus member of the Writers Guild of America, he edits GP360 online and
is author of American
Twilight.