The First Bill Clinton

Monday, March 26th: There was a bit of a dust-up. Two disparate visions of America baring their teeth and growling. Several left wing progressives disputed Gary Hart’s idea of America having the “moral authority” to lead the world, citing the imperial legacy of the U.S. push westward across the Continent, the support for right wing dictatorships during the Cold War, and the current war in Iraq. Frustrated but maintaining his cool, Hart held his own, arguing that America was a force for good in the world, despite having done many “bad things”. All in all, it was an interesting evening, an illuminating exchange between a liberal internationalist who supports the exercise of American power abroad and left wing skeptics who question American state power and its beneficence. Gary Hart, the former U.S. Senator from Colorado (1975-1987) and presidential candidate (1984 and 1988) whose ambitions for the Oval Office were sunk by his affair with Donna Rice, a former beauty queen, aboard the luxury yacht (the gods have a sense of humor!) Monkey Business in 1988, was in Denver to talk about his new book, Under the Eagle’s Wing, a detailed essay about U.S. National Security policy.

In His Own Words

“Actually it’s 18 books. I wrote another one last week.” [referring to his introduction where it was mentioned that he had written 17 books.]

“I went through a period in my life where on an airplane one of the flight attendants would say—and a rather mature one at that—’You spoke at my high school graduation.’ [laughter] I don’t mind that so much anymore. What I’m hearing now is, ‘My parents worked in your campaign.’ [laughter] And I think I’m getting very close to the introductory line where someone says, ‘Oh, is he still alive?’ [laughter]

“In a perfect world, there would be little serious disagreement about how to make the United States of America secure…. But we don’t live in a perfect world—in case you hadn’t noticed recently, therefore there are disagreements…. To a lesser degree, the same is true of the period 1947-1991, roughly the period of the Cold War, our national security strategy and central organizing principal was Containment of Communism. In case you hadn’t noticed, Americans like policies that fit on bumper stickers. Basically, seven or eight presidents of both political parties agreed on that principle [Containment of Communism]. There were off and on substantial disagreements about how to carry that out. And, by and large, liberal or progressive Americans and their elected representatives would question why we needed yet another missile type of nuclear bomb, aircraft carrier, or whatever. And, by and large, conservatives would say we need them all and probably even more. There were disagreements also over the foreign policies that the Cold War brought on, particularly when those policies—sometimes carried out behind the scenes—involved overthrowing governments that were uncooperative with us or whose leaders did not quite see the Communist threat the way we wanted them to. And it even got so bad—as I think we all know now—and I found out very early in my first year in the Senate, we were out to assassinate foreign leaders, including trying to assassinate Fidel Castro.”

“Let me just as quickly as I can summarize what I am trying to do here… We are living in a revolutionary age. The revolutions are globalization, the internationalization of our finance and commerce; the information revolution—the computer, the ability to exchange information. We are leading the world in that area. And it has brought a transformation of our economy from basically a manufacturing economy to an information based economy. And it has changed the way we learn, communicate, do our jobs, and basically live in all of its ramifications. Then you have, after the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the failure of countries, of nation-states, of governments. We had a mess in Yugoslavia, that was one. We’re having a mess now in the Middle East, in Iraq. Because Iraq is an artificial nation and somehow our President didn’t understand that when he invaded and overthrew its government. Now what we have on our hands is a 1300 year old conflict inside the Islamic world between two factions that have been after each other for 1300 years. And we just took the lid off that pot. So that’s a third revolution: nations are beginning to fall apart. And finally, the changing nature of warfare. We’re used to wars being waged by giant armies, massed armies in the field: WWI, WWII, to a degree, Korea, a slightly lesser scale with Korea, with Vietnam we really began to see how warfare is changing—we were fighting people who didn’t wear uniforms, sometimes attacked civilian targets, not as much in those days—but now we are in Iraq, where we are seeing how different warfare is going to be in the 21st century. And, of course, 9/11 in this country, seven years ago, demonstrated how war is going to be fought. So, against the backdrop of those revolutions, what I am going to try to argue for is that a whole new host of new realities are forcing us—or should force us—to think about what it means to be secure in a different way. What are those new realities? In no particular order, climate change. Eight months ago, 11 senior retired military officers, flag officers, meaning generals, admirals, produced a study which said that climate change is now a national security threat. And what they meant was if oceans do rise as it’s being predicted they will, hundreds of millions of people living on coastlines will have to head inland. That’s mass migration on a scale the world has never known. It will dislocate whole nations, whole societies, whole cultures. Whole countries will pick up and move north or south as the case may be, or inland. If you just think about that a moment, there is no military in the world, including our own, that can stop that from happening. They didn’t say climate change is an environmental threat. They said that climate change is a national security threat. That is to say, it’s going to create massive insecurity in this country and other parts of the world…. Then you have the possibility of pandemic, that means mass epidemics that circle the globe. I remember my parents telling me about the flu epidemic of 1917. People died, people in my family died. Perhaps some of your fore bearers were killed in the great flu epidemic. I think 50 million people. That’s a lot more than 9/11. It’s at least as many as WWII, depending on how you calculate that.”

“Security doesn’t mean just having the biggest military.”

“I suggest in this essay that America—I suggest three things—should be the watchman on the tower. We should use our intelligence collection in cooperation with others to look as far ahead as we can to anticipate dangers not just from terrorism but climate change and so forth and in effect warn the other nations of the world what’s coming and share that information not just keep it to ourselves. Second, we should be what I call ‘guardian of the commons’. Now, I don’t mean that we should go it alone. And by ‘commons’, those of you who know New England know that almost all New England towns are build on a square and that’s where in Boston and elsewhere was where people raised their cattle, nobody owned it, everybody owned it in ‘common’. And that’s what the idea of the commons was about. Well, we lost that. We in the West tend to be more independent, to live alone to a large degree. But I think increasingly we understand there are a lot of things that we own in common: oil and gas supplies on public lands, public land themselves, recreation rights, on and on and on. There’s nothing we own in common more than the environment itself: air, water, and public lands. We need to recapture that sense of the commons and frankly broaden it out to include the globe. There is a ‘global commons’…. But basically what we have in common as human beings. And that’s going to be central to American security and global security in the 21st century. And finally the third role is what I call the architecture of security. It is forming—as Truman did—new alliances and structuring new institutions. Let’s take a non-military one, I’ve mentioned global warming. There’s no international EPA. Finally in the 70’s, America realized we needed an agency to look after the environment. So the EPA was created. Is there an international one? No. Should there be one? I think so. Why isn’t there one? We don’t want foreign-speaking people telling us what to do.”

“Despite the modest size [referring to the small size of the book], there’s a lot of good stuff in here.” [laughter]

“But I finally end up with a principle. Containment of Communism was after 9/11 replaced by War on Terrorism. That’s a serious problem—crushing the jihad, the people who want to kill us. But it’s too small a description of America’s role in this new world of the 21st century. We’ve got a bigger job to do. That’s part of it. But it’s not all of it. And when you narrow the focus of the United States, our role in the world is to make war on terrorists, think of all you’ve left out. You wouldn’t have even scratched the surface of the things that need to be done to make our country secure and the globe secure. But I propose a somewhat larger, longer maybe not bumper sticker summary of our foreign and defense policy. It uses a kind of fancy Washington word: ‘Resist hegemony without seeking hegemony’. What that means is ‘We don’t want anyone else running the world but we don’t want to try and run it ourselves’. So with our allies we will prevent domination from any other single power source and then we can liberate ourselves to address the serious unmet agenda that this book discusses.”