The New Imperialism: Stabilization and Reconstruction or the Responsibility
to Fix (R2F)
Anthony C. E Quainton
“If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social
and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference
from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general
loosening of the ties of civilized society may in America and elsewhere, ultimately require
intervention by some civilized nation and in the Western Hemisphere may force the United
States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrong doing or impotence to the
exercise of an international police power.”
Theodore Roosevelt 1905
“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets”
Max Boot, October 15, 2001 Since Theodore Roosevelt announced his famous corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1905 and
sent the Great White Fleet around in the world in 1906/07, the United States has consciously
sought to project its power across the globe. In the first half of the 20th century the U. S. acted as
if it were a traditional imperial power, exercising an international police power, particularly in
the Caribbean, and managing the colonies acquired in the Spanish-American War much as the
European empires managed theirs, i.e. with a strong authoritarian hand and a confident sense of a
civilizing mission. That phase of American imperialism came to an end with the independence
of the Philippines in 1945 to be replaced by the bi-polar imperialisms of the Cold War. That
period, the second half of the 20th Century, was seen by many observers as a zero sum imperial
competition for influence and domination. However one regards the fundamental nature of the
competition between western democracies and communism, there is little doubt that it led to
repeated instances in which both the Soviet Union and the United States deployed power in
defense of their national security interests and their values. From the Berlin Blockade and the
Truman Doctrine’s support of Greece and Turkey to the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and the
proxy wars in Africa and Central America, the United States took upon itself, often with the
support of formal alliance partners, occasionally without, the use of its power to confront the
Soviet Union’s global ambitions.
That world of bipolar competition came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States emerged as the sole global superpower,
assuming for itself the role of global stabilizer. It is and likely will remain for most of the 21st
century the country with the largest and most effective military capability. The U.S. is what the
French like to call not just a super power but a hyper power. Indeed the U. S. is hyper in almost
every sense of that word: at the same time both hyperactive and hypersensitive. This power
when combined with the long tradition of American exceptionalism emphasized the reach and
importance of American power. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in a graduation
address at Notre Dame University this May: “Make no mistake, the ultimate guarantee against
the success of aggressors, dictators, and terrorists in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is hard
power -- the size, strength, and global reach of the United States military,” Madeleine Albright as
early as 1998 was describing America as the “indispensible” power on the world stage. “We are
the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future,
and we see the danger here to all of us”. The Hart-Rudman Commission in its final report issued
only eight months before the tragedy of September 11 assumed that America “must be prepared
to act unilaterally if necessary” since he United States is “the prime keeper of the international
security commons.” One could, of course, go back almost a hundred years to Woodrow Wilson’s
passionate plea to make the world safe for democracy.
The United States sees itself as fundamentally different from the rest of the world and with a
moral obligation, an almost missionary obligation, to transform the world through the power of
its ideas and values, the ingenuity of its diplomats and development experts and, when necessary,
through the force of arms. Indispensability is a heavy burden to bear for it implies and requires
action on the part of the indispensable power.
Technologically there is no military which can compare with the sophisticated systems which the
United States can deploy. Its budgetary allocations dwarf those of other countries accounting for
almost half (48%) of global spending on defense. The U.S. spends 4.7 percent of its GDP on
defense whereas Britain spends on 2.7%, France 2.5% and Germany a mere 1.4%. Its leaders of
both political parties have committed the United States to maintaining an ability to project its
power to every corner of the globe and to be able to fight two conflicts simultaneously if need
be.
If the United States has the means to continue to project its power and a long tradition of seeking
to do so, what does that imply for the remainder of the 21dt Century? American presidents since
the end of the Cold War have been searching for a framework for the projection of American
power. The early Clinton Administrations tried to use “enlargement” as a core concept, but it
quickly became clear that the U.S. was not sure what it was enlarging: the zone of freedom or
something else? Clinton subsequently enunciated what came to be known as the Clinton
Doctrine: a doctrine used to justify intervention in Bosnia but which is applicable virtually
anywhere in the world to justify intervention for humanitarian reasons. As Clinton put it:
“It's easy ... to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in
Bosnia or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa or some piece of parched
earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or
distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The
question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester
and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where
our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be
prepared to do so”.
This concept has been further elaborated by the United Nations in the R2P concept: the
Responsibility to Protect. The United Nations has declared that:
1. A State has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes
against humanity and ethnic cleansing (mass atrocities).
2. If the State is unable to protect its population on its own, the international community has
a responsibility to assist the state by building its capacity. This can mean building earlywarning capabilities, mediating conflicts between political parties, strengthening the
security sector, mobilizing standby forces, and many other actions.
3. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful
measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene
at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.
However, the problem with this doctrine, which has been embraced by the Obama
Administration, is that, while in theory it represents an universal obligation, only the United
States has the will and resources to enforce it, particularly if the use of military force required.
Libya is a rather poignant example of the difficulty of actually living up to the responsibility to
protect. The concept of “leading from behind” which the current Administration articulate, was
greeted with scorn in many quarters as an abandonment of the necessary lead role of America.
In the period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, whose tenth anniversary will
arrive in only a few days, the United States, exercising its right of self-defense, launched a war
in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and eliminate a sanctuary tor Al Qaida and the perpetrators of
the 9/11 attacks. It subsequently engaged in what has come to be called a “war of choice”, to
overthrow Saddam Hussein and to eliminate a regime that was erroneously thought to be a key
supporter of terrorism and a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. Without going into the
specific justifications for these two wars, about which there remains considerable controversy on
both sides of the Atlantic, it is important to look at some of the consequences of those
interventions: the principal one being what could be described as the R2F doctrine: the
responsibility to fix.
Colin Powell famously pointed out that having broken the crockery we had an obligation to fix
it. The need to fix Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in the elaboration of a new doctrine of
reconstruction and stabilization operations. In both countries where the United States intervened
after 9/11 it was quickly apparent that the “fixing” of these societies was not merely a matter of
reforming the security services and empowering the central government, important as both of
these two efforts have turned out to be. Looked at from the perspective of the American desire
to simultaneously promote both democracy and development, it was evident that nationwide
grassroots efforts would be needed to supplement the central government’s efforts. Civil society
would also have to be encouraged and supported. The United States, in short, became committed
to nation-building.
The operational mechanism that evolved is the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) composed
of defense, development and diplomatic officers. PRTs are civil-military units originally
designed to assist Iraqi provincial governments with developing a “transparent and sustained
capability” to govern, promote political and economic development, and provide provincial
administration necessary to meet the basic needs of the population. This would appear to be, a
classic colonial mission. While the PRT concept was originally designed for Iraq it has been
replicated in Afghanistan on a multinational basis. It is ironic that this quintessentially American
idea should have been adopted by NATO nations as part of their alliance obligations. Canada,
Germany, Italy, Lithuania and the UK all now operate PRTs in Afghanistan, although the United
States leads a total of 12 in Afghanistan and 22 in Iraq. It is interesting that different countries
use different models. The dominant US model is that each PRT is composed of 80 personnel of
which only 3-5 are civilians. They are led by a military commander and have an emphasis on
quick impact projects. The UK model averages 100 personnel of which 30 are civilian and
emphasizes local capacity building. The German model has 400 personnel of which 20 are
civilians focusing on long-term sustainable development. Clearly not all NATO members are
singing from the same sheet of music when it comes to nation-building. All are participating in
what to many Afghans and Iraqis is a multilateral imperial endeavor.
This is not the place to assess the viability of the PRT concept. Suffice it to note that the
structures create numerous problems of coordination between foreign ministries, aid agencies
and military establishments. Funding availability varies greatly. In the case of the United
States, the military has the most available resources for these nation-building tasks: school and
health post construction, well-drilling, even the construction of internet cafes. Since 2004 the
United States Congress has appropriated $7.6 billion for the Commander’s Emergency Response
Program CERP), the basic pot of money available to military commanders for these
developmental projects. For Fiscal year 2011 alone the Administration requested $1.3 billion for
CERP. These are enormous sums essentially for use in only two countries. The amounts far
exceed the resources available to either the State Department or the Agency for International
Development for use in the same places.
In order to support these new initiatives the White House directed the State Department to create
an Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization (matched in the U.K. by a post Conflict
Reconstruction Unit). This office, under the immediate direction of the Secretary of State, but in
fact located away from the central State Department building, was designed to begin the process
of forward planning for future stabilization and reconstruction efforts relying on an interagency
mixture of career civilian and military officers supported by a reserve corps of retired civilian
officers. As a part of the recently completed Quadrennial Development and Diplomacy Review
(the QDDR) this office, which originally was an appendage to the office of the Secretary of
State, is to become an independent Bureau of Stabilization Operations with its own Assistant
Secretary of State. While the original intention was to give this new office substantial human and
financial resources to engage in planning for and implementation of stabilization operations, the
current tight budget reality in Washington may not make that possible.
What is more significant is the underlying assumption behind first the creation of the PRTs and
now a Bureau of Stabilization Operations,. That assumption is that the United States will be
called on increasingly in the 21st century to carry out such operations. While the wars on the
scale of those in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be repeated, planners in both the State
Department and the Pentagon are looking ahead and assume that the United States will be called
upon to “fix” increasing numbers of failed, failing or war and disaster-ravaged states.
Reportedly the State Department has already identified twenty countries that will be in need of
such operations in the next decade.
Stabilization and Reconstruction are, of course, different concepts. On one hand stabilization
implies an ability of the international community and particularly of the United States to move in
to halt the decline of a country by rebuilding its infrastructure, developing civil society and
contributing to sustainable development. Failing states will not, under this doctrine, be allowed
to fail. Reconstruction is likely to come in two forms: the rebuilding of an economy after
conflict and the reconstruction necessary after a major natural disaster (Haiti, Pakistan, Indonesia
etc). In both cases it is assumed that the United States will move in with a variety of resources to
fix whatever is broken in the country requiring help.
As we have seen from Afghanistan and Iraq the remaking of these two societies has been a long
and arduous process. And this task is not complete yet, in the case of Afghanistan after almost
ten years of effort. If the United States turns out to be serious about this new mission, America
will have to be prepared to stay the course, leaving large military and civilian entities in place to
both provide security to stabilize a country and reconstruct its shattered economy and society. It
there ever was an imperial mission, this is it.
The institutional model we are trying to impose is one based on American experience and values.
The good news is that such imperial aspirations based on the long history of American
exceptionalism and the export of American values, run up against an almost equally deep desire
for isolation, a desire to remain uncontaminated by a morally deficient world. This tendency
increases at times of economic crisis or scarcity where the American electorate calls on its
political leadership to pull back and concentrate on problems at home rather than engage in
foreign adventure. That is what is happening today. However, it would be well to remember
that the structures that have been created will enable the United Sates to move more aggressively
back into the international arena when the political climate shifts. America has not forgotten that
it is an “indispensable” country and the urge to reengage will surely reemerge. If and when it
does a new phase in the long history of the American imperial project may begin. Unfortunately
jodhpurs and pith helmets are in short supply.