Institute
for Advanced Strategic
and Political Studies
IASPS Research Papers in Strategy
By
Carnes Lord
“Today
there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis
management.” So said Robert S.
McNamara, secretary of defense of the United States during the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962.[i] McNamara was congratulating himself and
other top officials of the Kennedy administration for having mastered a style
of decision making he thought vital in the nuclear age. Though governments have had to deal with
crises since time immemorial, “crisis management” is an invention of the
1960s. Proponents of the concept have
often looked back to the July Crisis of 1914, which precipitated World War I,
but the immediate inspiration for most theorizing about crises has been the
US-Soviet conflict of the past half century, especially insofar as it involved
nuclear weaponry. With the collapse of
the Soviet threat at the end of the 1980s, crisis management seems to have lost
much of its centrality for decision makers and policy analysts. Since the phenomenon of crisis is a general
one in international affairs, however, it remains of more than passing
importance to understand the dynamics of crisis situations and how to manage
them successfully.
At
the same time, it is also obvious that there is much that is problematic in the
theory and practice of crisis management in recent decades.[ii] Even during the Cold War, it is not
self-evident that the pragmatic decision making style of the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations was superior to the more plodding but strategically
oriented approach followed in the Eisenhower years. The crisis management outlook and practices so widely credited
with the United States’ successful handling of the confrontation over Cuba in
1962 also contributed in a major way to the debacle of American intervention in
Vietnam and the signal failure of leadership that was principally responsible
for it. Today, crisis management in the pejorative sense may be said to be the modus operandi of most of the world’s democracies. Weak leadership, a certain lack of
seriousness in dealing with a world seen as less threatening than during the
Cold War, the entanglements of multilateral diplomacy ─ these and other
factors combine to encourage reactive and ad hoc approaches to security
challenges. If there are places in
today’s world where strategy flourishes, it is rather in authoritarian states
(China, Syria, Iraq) with experienced and well-entrenched leaders and clearly
defined national objectives.
Properly
understood, crisis management is an aspect or mode of strategy, not a
substitute for it. This at any rate is the underlying premise of the analysis
that follows. Some may worry that such
an approach blurs the distinctiveness of the phenomenon of crisis management,
validating simplistic approaches to the use of military force and impairing the
ability or willingness of leaders to seek negotiated solutions to their
security problems. Suffice it to say
that strategy as used here should by no means be taken to imply a prejudice
against conciliation or against diplomacy as an instrument of statecraft. Indeed, one could argue that crisis
management as conceived and practiced during the Cold War was if anything insufficiently respectful of traditional
diplomacy, while it exaggerated the value of military force when employed for
directly political purposes.
Crisis management is by no means a
uniquely American problem. During the
Cold War itself, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the People’s Republic
of China, as well as many lesser states, experienced significant political-military crises. Israel probably belongs in a category of its
own as a nation existing in a state of semi-permanent crisis. In addition, there is a rich record of
well-documented crisis decision making involving the major powers of pre-1945
Europe that dates back at least to the Crimean War. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the greatly diminished
threat of nuclear war, this older experience has regained much of its interest. At the same time, there is also increasing
demand (or at any rate manifest need) for crisis management expertise on the
part of regional and international organizations, most notably the United
Nations itself, which have begun to play a much larger role in
political-military crises than was the case during the Cold War.
Nevertheless,
there are several reasons for limiting the focus of this discussion to the
United States. America has had greater
and more varied crisis experience in the postwar era than any other power; and
this experience has been thoroughly documented and analyzed ─ in part
because the institutions and operations of the United States government are
unusually transparent, but in part also because of the greater
self-consciousness with which the United States has engaged in crisis
management. In addition, bureaucratic
structures for crisis management have generally been more highly developed in
the United States than anywhere else.
Finally, as will be argued here, the American case reveals with
particular clarity what might be called the pathologies of crisis management
─ not least, the tendency of crisis management to emancipate itself from
the larger strategic context. The strengths and limitations of crisis
management as an aspect of statecraft are therefore more readily visible in and
through the American experience.[iii]
This
study attempts neither a systematic survey of recent crises and approaches to
handling them, nor a review of the voluminous academic literature on this
subject. Rather, it tries to introduce
crisis management to those relatively unfamiliar with it by providing a
conceptual analysis of the fundamental issues at play, a very brief and
selective sampling of international crises and crisis-related behavior since
1939, and some thoughts on future directions for crisis management after the
Cold War. I begin with a discussion of
the origins of the notion of crisis management in the Cold War, offer an
appraisal of past and current thinking about the nature of crises, and argue
for the need to revisit some basic assumptions concerning the relationship of
crisis and war or the use of force and the core tasks of crisis management.
Everyday
life is full of crises ─ personal crises, family crises, social crises,
economic crises. Governmental crises,
whether caused by scandal, coalition politics, or unexpected international
developments, are preoccupying events for the leadership of contemporary
democracies. Severe non-military crises
such as the Great Depression of the 1930s can pose challenges as fundamental as
major wars. At the extreme, crises of
regime ─ the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 or the collapse of the Soviet
Union in the late 1980s, for example ─ can lead to revolution, civil war,
and vast and unpredictable changes on the international scene.
Crises
in the relations of states can be equally dramatic and demanding of attention
at the highest level of government; but they can also be difficult to
distinguish from the normal course of international affairs. Today, the term crisis seems to be used with
ever-increasing frequency and looseness to refer to virtually any international
development that reaches the front page of major newspapers: We speak of the
Asian financial crisis, the Rwandan refugee crisis, the (by now long-standing)
crisis in the former Yugoslavia. There
has always been some vagueness in the way the term has been used both in
ordinary life and in the academic literature on international affairs. But in the
relatively benign international environment we currently enjoy, crisis aspects
of ordinary policy making seem to get blown out of proportion. Crises are at once everywhere and
nowhere. If this is so, however, a case
might be made that the idea of crisis has lost its utility as a tool of policy
analysis.
A
special effort is therefore needed to understand the ways in which the concept
and the craft of crisis management have been shaped by the matrix of the Cold
War and the character of contemporary democracy. The key circumstance, of course, was the emergence of nuclear
weapons as the core military capability of the United States and its principal
rival, the Soviet Union. They soon gave rise to the conviction that war on a
global scale could no longer be understood (in the formulation of Carl von
Clausewitz) as an extension of policy by other means, or as subject to the
traditional logic of strategy. This
view reflected not only the increasing reach and destructiveness of the weapons
themselves, but also the difficulty of defending against them. The development of ballistic missiles and
bombers of intercontinental range for the first time made the American and
Russian heartlands vulnerable to strategic bombardment. At the same time, the technologies
supporting nuclear offensive forces greatly outpaced those available for
defense against them. Eventually,
defense against nuclear attack would come to be seen by many (at any rate in
the West) as not only futile but dangerous, and mutual societal vulnerability
as the essential precondition for deterring nuclear use and discouraging an
open-ended nuclear arms race between the superpowers. This is what led a generation of thinkers to regard the dynamics
of superpower crisis as the
overriding problem of international security, eclipsing more basic strategic
questions concerning the outcome of the geopolitical confrontation between the
US and the USSR.
Minimizing
the risk of nuclear war by preventing escalation of tensions between the
superpowers entailed two distinct tasks.
The first was to structure nuclear forces in such a way as to provide as
few incentives as possible for either side to use them in a crisis. Success in this endeavor ─ achieved by
unilateral decisions in nuclear force planning as well as by mutual agreement
in an ongoing process of superpower arms control ─ was supposed to lead
to a condition often called “crisis stability.” The second task was to devise a system to ensure control of
nuclear forces in a crisis by the highest levels of government. Only in this way, it was thought, would it
be possible for governments to withstand escalatory pressures from military
commanders as well as to minimize the possibility of unauthorized or accidental
use of nuclear weaponry. At the same
time, opportunities would be afforded for the adroit manipulation of military
risk to shape the behavior of the adversary and to advance broad national
interests.[iv]
McNamara’s
remark that “there is no longer such a thing as strategy, only crisis management”
was intended to underline the importance of the handling of crisis situations
by the president of the United States and his senior advisers directly rather
than by a military leadership assumed to be biased toward narrowly military
approaches to international questions.
Implicitly, it asserted the existence of a higher-order expertise, one
drawing largely on civilian perspectives drawn from business and the academy
that transcended the old culture of victory and strategy that had dominated
American thinking in World War II.
According to this line of thinking, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most
acute and war-threatening US-Soviet confrontation of the Cold War, was
paradigmatic. Features of this particular crisis ─ the role of secrecy
and surprise in its outbreak, its very brief duration, the intensity and stress
accompanying it, the decisiveness of its outcome ─ regularly found their
way into academic definitions of crises generally. And the handling of this situation by President John F. Kennedy
─ with sustained involvement by officials at the highest level, sharp
civilian-military disagreements, an obsession with miscalculation and
inadvertent escalation, with posturing, signalling, and bargaining in the
shadow of nuclear apocalypse ─ was to become the model for “crisis
management” simply. Crisis management
in this sense required an unprecedented sensitivity to and cooperation with the
adversary in a situation in which both sides had more to lose than either had
to gain. For this reason, managing
crises required an unprecedented level of control of the military instrument by
the civilian authorities, who would now wield a surgeon’s scalpel rather than
the bludgeon of soldierly tradition. New technologies supporting instantaneous
communication helped make this kind of control possible.[v]
While
the impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis on subsequent thinking about crises and
crisis management is difficult to exaggerate, in retrospect a case can
certainly be made that it was exceptional, even in Cold War terms.[vi] No other US-Soviet crisis involved a truly
palpable risk (or perception of risk) of nuclear war. No other US-Soviet crisis involved such a direct confrontation
between the superpowers, and hence afforded a similar setting and incentives
for direct crisis bargaining. Other
US-Soviet crises might or might not involve surprise (even the Berlin crisis of
1948 should probably have been foreseen).
Some crises, particularly the rolling Berlin crisis of the period
1958-1961, were essentially exercises in public diplomacy or psychological
warfare in which surprise was not a factor, and were protracted to an extent
that severely stretches the normal usage of the term.
As
memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis faded and the US-Soviet relationship entered
a phase of detente centering on the pursuit of strategic arms control, the
crisis paradigm began to lose much of its plausibility. The crisis associated
with the Arab-Israeli conflict of October 1973 was the only subsequent occasion
on which the United States raised the alert level of its nuclear forces in
response to threatening Soviet behavior.
Meanwhile, unilateral steps (notably, improved nuclear command and
control arrangements) as well as negotiated measures (such as the US-Soviet
Hotline and the 1972 Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War)
helped to ease fears that crisis situations could spin out of political control
and lead to unwanted escalation.
Moreover, the political leadership on both sides seemed increasingly
risk-averse and committed to preventing nuclear conflict at virtually any cost,
while senior military ranks showed much greater sensitivity to civilian
concerns on this score (and were more willing to play the arms control game)
than their counterparts in 1962. In
short, even the extraordinary US-Soviet nuclear relationship had become
ordinary.
Nevertheless,
the legacy of the Cuban crisis has shaped the meaning of the term crisis up to
our own time. In spite of many
variations, the term is regularly tied to a period of acute tension between
states that threatens the prospect of major war. To cite one influential academic definition from the 1970s: “An
international crisis is a sequence of interactions between the governments of
two or more sovereign states in severe conflict, short of actual war, but
involving the perception of a dangerously high probability of war.”[vii] More recent attempts at a theory of crisis
have largely accepted this approach, while at the same time blurring somewhat
the distinctiveness of crisis and war or the use of force. A new study defines crisis as a perception
by the highest level decision makers of “a threat to one or more basic values,
along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat, and a
heightened probability of involvement in military hostilities.”[viii] According to this view, surprise is not a
necessary component of crisis, and the time span involved is limited only very
loosely (months or even a year). All
that is required for a crisis is a “heightened” perception of the possibility
of an armed clash, which may itself fall well short of war in any sense of the
term.
Such
an approach runs the risk of trivializing the idea of crisis insofar as it
fails to provide criteria for distinguishing serious from less serious
situations and accurate from skewered perceptions of these situations. But broadening the notion of crisis in this
way is surely inevitable. Note also
that the study just mentioned holds that crisis and war are not mutually
exclusive. The proposition that a
crisis can occur not only before but during military hostilities (an “intra-war
crisis”) is both plausible and useful, pointing as it does to the ineluctably strategic character of genuine crisis situations. War does not necessarily require the sustained engagement of a
nation’s political leadership. Such
engagement is required, however, on
those occasions when a major political or military development offers an
unexpected opportunity or threatens catastrophic defeat. Chinese intervention in the Korean War in
the fall of 1950 is a good example of such a crisis; others include major
battles that mark a fundamental shift in the fortunes of the combatants, such
as Stalingrad or El Alamein during World War II. The challenge of such crises lies in recognizing them as such,
rather than treating them simply as part of the flow of military operations and
hence not requiring special civilian scrutiny ─ the great American error
in the Korean War.
The logic underlying the notion of
intra-war crisis suggests the desirability of a further step: recognition of
the crisis-like character of the climactic final stage and immediate aftermath
of war. That the termination phase of a
war could be, or contain, a crisis seems at first sight paradoxical, as analysts
have been accustomed to understanding the dynamics of crisis in terms of
escalation and deescalation. Yet it is
surely a mistake to equate intensity of violence with strategic significance or
policy interest. Both World War II and
the Gulf War of 1990-1991 provide clear evidence of the consequences of failure
on the part of an American president to recognize the point at which
considerations of the shape of the international political order should take
priority over the perceived requirements of the military endgame. Crises ─ critical turning points in a
conflict, demanding the engagement or reengagement of a nation’s civilian
leadership in strategic decision making ─ occur before, during, and even
after the shooting, regardless of the level of violence involved or threatened.
An additional distinction
may be introduced here. In a highly
original study, Yehezkal Dror develops the notion of “adversity” as a policy
environment that is broader than crisis as such.[ix] Policy making in adversity is distinguished
from policy making in normal or benign circumstances by the fact that the
political leadership of a nation stands in greater need of external aids to
decision making ─ information, analysis, advice, the careful coordination
of a variety of instruments of statecraft.
Adversity may have different faces.
One of its forms is protracted conflict, of the sort experienced by the
United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and by the Arabs and
Israelis since 1947. Protracted
conflict is not identical with crisis or war, but it may be described as a
condition of proneness to crisis or war.[x] Policy making in adversity, crisis and war
therefore is both continuous and discrete, reflecting differences in the
intensity of these environments and the demands they impose on policy
makers.
The
classical crisis management paradigm tends to overstate the discontinuities
between crisis and non-crisis situations.
While it would be going too far to say that crises exist only in the eye
of the beholder, there is surely an important sense in which this is true.[xi] Crises are constituted by the perceptions of
political leaders ─ perceptions of both an objective threat and a more or
less subjective set of national and personal values and goals. For leaders who lack judgment, vision and
nerve, ordinary problems balloon easily into crises. And ─ a point rarely remarked on ─ political leaders
have both incentives and disincentives to identify situations as crises. Proclaiming a particular foreign threat a crisis
may be politically useful in many ways; but it may also make it difficult or
impossible to resolve outstanding issues through negotiation with the other
party.[xii] Casual talk of crisis may make a political
leader look weak if not followed by commensurate action. All of this is to suggest that identifying
crises properly is a more complex exercise than seems to be generally assumed,
and needs to be understood as an integral aspect of crisis management itself ─
or perhaps better, of policy making under adversity.
The
original meaning of the (classical Greek) word krisis is “judgment” or “decision.” A crisis in its most general sense really is a defining moment
─ a point in a developing series of events where significant change
becomes possible, and which therefore calls for decision by those in authority.
In the political arena, what distinguishes a crisis mode of policy making is
the need for rapid judgment and decision by a nation’s political
leadership. Why this need? For two related reasons: because of the
complexity of the issues raised in crises as well as the governmental
instruments that handle them; and because of the consensus style of decision
making that is the norm in most contemporary democracies. Direct intervention by the highest political
authority is essential under such circumstances in order to make difficult
tradeoffs between policy goods or evils, to coordinate recalcitrant
bureaucracies, and not least, to effect a transition from a consensus to a
command mode of leadership.
That
crisis management so understood is a preeminently strategic function has been
recognized by perceptive students of the subject.[xiii] What has not been recognized adequately is
the scope and complexity of this strategic function. Students of crisis management have tended to focus almost
exclusively on the instruments of force and diplomacy and their competing
requirements. As a result, they have
both overstated the severity and inevitability of the tension between force and
diplomacy,[xiv] and
understated the importance of other factors in crises. One need only glance at the recently
declassified tapes of high-level White House meetings during the Cuban Missile
Crisis to realize how prominent intelligence issues can be in crisis
deliberations.[xv] A second factor is public opinion both
international and domestic, and the competing demands of secrecy and
publicity. The economic and financial
aspects of crisis are a third factor, rarely discussed yet at least in some
cases (consider the prelude to the Gulf War in the fall of 1990) exceedingly
important. A fourth is law enforcement
and the legal dimension generally (consider American dealings with Manuel
Noriega at the time of the Panama crisis of 1989, and the burgeoning movement
to create an international war crimes tribunal). Finally, there is the exercise of command as such, that is, the
management of men and institutions. The
Argentine junta might have won the Falklands War had it not made the fatal
mistake of installing a military bureaucrat instead of a combat leader or
strategist as the islands’ governor.[xvi] President Truman’s toleration of the erratic
and insubordinate behavior of Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War
illustrates the opposite error. Lack of
sensitivity to the importance of personality in key subordinates as well as a
reluctance to discipline and if necessary relieve those who perform poorly is
an obvious and yet strikingly neglected weakness of contemporary crisis
management.
Several
final points need to be made. Perhaps
the most enduring legacy of Cold War crisis management thinking and practices
is the assumption that its overriding strategic purpose is to minimize risk
rather than maximize gain. This may
seem a self-evident maxim for managers of nuclear “brinksmanship.” At a
certain point, however, crisis management so understood begins to produce
diminishing returns, and slides toward appeasement. Particularly troublesome is
the idea that any significant preparations for war should be avoided during a
crisis because they might be misinterpreted by the other side (or even by one’s
own military forces) and lead to unwanted escalation. The United States entered two world wars in this century with
deficiencies in military preparedness that in retrospect are virtually beyond
belief. Preparation for war should be
seen as a critical strategic task of crisis management, not something to be
improvised at the last minute once crisis management has failed.
In
a larger perspective, it is well to bear in mind this under appreciated
insight: “The view that crises are undesirable neglects their positive
aspects. Crises present opportunities
not available in routine policy making.
They provide the chance to motivate and mobilize citizens and the bureaucracy
to action, to unify, to organize interest groups, and to move forward in areas
where such programs might not be possible otherwise.”[xvii] The Chinese word for crisis contains the
characters standing for both “danger” and “opportunity.” As is often recognized, even (and perhaps
especially) severe crises can provide an impetus to improved relations between the states involved (the Cuban Missile
Crisis is a case in point). But crises
can also afford manifold opportunities to skilled political leaders to
strengthen alliances, to bolster the legitimacy of their regimes, and in other
ways to advance their nation’s international interests.
There
is today a widespread tendency to understand crisis management as a form of
“conflict resolution,” in which third parties set out to prevent or end violent
conflict between two other parties. One
need not question the value of such efforts in principle to caution against the
dangers of over optimism, over activism, and misplaced humanitarianism. Many
conflicts are stubbornly resistant to mediation by outside parties, and
there may well be cases (consider especially the successful Croatian offensive
against Serb-controlled areas in Croatia and Bosnia in 1995) where military
action is the only realistic option for advancing the prospects for a political
settlement over the longer run. There
are crises where the most humanitarian course for third parties may well be to
let the contending sides fight it out.
This
brings us to a last point. Like the larger
body of strategic thought of which it was a part, traditional crisis management
theory was very much affected by the axioms and aspirations of the social
science of its era. Implicitly or
explicitly, it accepted the notion that crises and human behavior during crises
can be analyzed in terms of abstract models and a set of universally applicable
rules or precepts deriving from them.
Its assumption of a homo
strategicus, engaged in fine-grained, dispassionate analysis of options and
tradeoffs, was as much an artificial construct as the homo economicus of modern economics, and equally insensitive to the
vagaries of personality and culture.[xviii] Hence it tended to postulate adversaries
that were mirror-images of the home team rather than enigmas of otherness that
demanded careful decoding. Failure to
assess systematically the processes, styles and psychology of crisis decision
making in nations other than the United States is a persisting feature of
crisis management theory and practice alike.
Indeed, some of the most conspicuous lapses in the history of American
crisis management arguably derive directly from a failure to heed one of the
fundamental maxims of strategy ─ Sun Tzu’s advice to know the enemy and
know yourself.
None
of this is to deny that the United States has enjoyed some successes in the
crisis management business. Yet its
failures are, as always, more instructive.
In what follows, I will look briefly at three major political-military
crises involving the United States over the past sixty years: the US-Japanese
crisis of 1939-1941, the US-Soviet crisis in the fall of 1962, and the endgame
of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991.
These have been chosen not only to highlight the pitfalls of crisis
decision making, but to illustrate the different types of crisis environments
and the varying strategic problems they pose.
The diversity of the opponents involved also helps bring into focus the
neglected strategic-cultural dimension of crisis management.
On December 7, 1941, a surprise assault by
Japanese carrier aircraft on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor launched
the United States into World War II. It
is not customary to examine the events leading up to Pearl Harbor in the
perspective of crisis management, in large part because of the still very
generally held assumption that the Japanese action was the outcome of an
inscrutable strategic calculation over which the United States had little or no
influence. Pearl Harbor has tended to
be treated as a failure of American intelligence, not of American policy. In fact, it is not at all clear that war was
the fated outcome of the US-Japanese relationship of the late 1930s and early
1940s, or that the United States could not have managed that relationship so as
to avoid hostilities on a basis consistent with its fundamental national
interests. If in fact it was possible
for the United States to achieve a satisfactory settlement of its long-standing
dispute with Japan in order to focus its energies on the more serious Nazi
threat, its failure to do so must be seen as one of the greatest strategic
errors of American policy in this century, one that plunged the nation into a
desperate struggle on two fronts for which it was scarcely prepared.
President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the greatest
American presidents. A virtuoso of
political maneuver, Roosevelt presided over an administration where power and
responsibility were intentionally fragmented among competing officials so as to
maximize his own freedom of action. In
foreign affairs, Roosevelt was his own crisis manager, unsupported by any
formal mechanism for interdepartmental coordination. Even with the hindsight and accumulated historical analysis of
many decades, it is not easy to reconstruct Roosevelt’s policy toward
Japan. Some have concluded that he
played a deep game, intentionally provoking the Japanese attack in order to
swing an isolationist public opinion behind the war effort. While this seems highly unlikely, it is
difficult to deny that from 1938 on, American policy as a whole was
surprisingly provocative given the continuing weakness of the nation’s
defenses. The truth of the matter seems
to be that Roosevelt never really pursued a consistent line toward the Japanese
─ that ends and means, words and deeds, never fully cohered. In an effort to satisfy one set of domestic
opinions, FDR routinely attacked Japanism militarism in public speeches and
applied economic pressures of increasing intensity; at the same time, to ward
off criticism from other quarters, he pursued diplomatic initiatives and
avoided threatening military measures.
This kept the Japanese off balance and uncertain what the United States
was really after. To the extent that he
had an overall strategy, it seems to have been to bluff the Japanese into
abandoning or delaying their course of conquest in Asia, while waiting on
events elsewhere to strengthen America’s hand.[xix]
Could
Roosevelt have better handled the American-Japanese relationship during these
critical years? There are good reasons
for thinking so. In February 1939, when
FDR returned the ashes of Ambassador Hiroshi Saito in an American battle cruiser,
the reaction of the Japanese people was virtually a demonstration in favor of
improved relations with the United States.
Roosevelt sought to suppress the impact of this unintentionally
effective act of public diplomacy. In
August 1939, when the liberal ministry of Nobuyuki Abe assumed power in Tokyo
and pressed for a renewal of the vital US-Japanese trade treaty, while fending
off pressures for a deal with Hitler, Roosevelt’s intransigence contributed
centrally to Abe’s fall in December.
The wild inconsistency of which Roosevelt was capable was particularly
evident in the summer of 1940, when he launched a private diplomatic feeler
concerning a possible Pacific non-aggression pact and spoke approvingly in
public of a (Japanese) Monroe Doctrine for Asia, only to turn around and impose
a partial trade embargo on Japan in July.
Even after Japanese accession to the Tripartite Pact, however, Tokyo
seems to have been prepared and indeed eager to strike a bargain with the
United States. Japanese councils were
divided, but the ministry of Prince Konoye might well have succeeded in
reconciling the Japanese army to an eventual withdrawal from China and
effective neutrality in the struggle with Germany; and in fact the Japanese, in
the protracted Hull-Nomura talks of 1941, came very far in the direction of
these essential American desiderata.
But the president’s refusal to meet with Konoye at a Pacific summit, and
what can only be described as the lack of seriousness in Hull’s conduct of
these negotiations, seem to have persuaded the Japanese that they had little to
hope from diplomacy. This, coupled with
the de facto oil embargo imposed by the United States in July together with the
continuing weakness of American defenses in the Pacific, set the stage for Pearl
Harbor, and a war the Japanese knew they were unlikely to win but thought
unavoidable without a total abdication of their national honor.
The
Pacific crisis of 1939-1941 is an object lesson in the dangers of an
improvising and highly personalized style of crisis management. Roosevelt’s secretiveness, his chaotic
management style, and his constant tactical maneuvers unconnected to any
visible strategic design, confused friends and enemies alike. His use of diplomacy (including private
channels that could be easily repudiated) was devious to the point of
unreliability, and debased the coin of American power in ways that were
particularly damaging in a time of world crisis. But perhaps the most serious flaw in Roosevelt’s pre-war
statecraft was his failure to understand, or to make an effort to understand,
the adversary.[xx] As was sadly the case with many Americans at
the time, Roosevelt had little regard for the Japanese and was inclined to see
them in broad caricature. He was
tone-deaf when it came to Japanese cultural sensitivities. He made no apparent effort to appreciate the
delicate internal politics of the Japanese cabinet and the exposure (to
assassination, among other things) of ministers who tried to accommodate
American interests, much less to attempt to influence cabinet deliberations in
ways favorable to the United States.
And while he seems to have assumed (at least after 1940) that war with
Japan was inevitable, he may well have believed the Japanese would not prove
especially formidable in battle. At any
rate, it is not easy to account on any other assumption for Roosevelt’s
seemingly relaxed view of American military requirements in the Pacific
throughout the crisis.
A
final point is worth emphasizing.
Analysts of crisis management tend to focus on military action by the
parties as the primary source of destabilizing or war-provoking behavior. The Pacific crisis is interesting as an
example of a war arising from provocative economic and diplomatic activity
rather than from any military measures.
The fact that the critical freeze on oil imports to Japan in July 1941
was not intended by the president as a complete embargo shows that economic no
less than military operations in crises may escape the control of the political
leadership and lead to unwanted escalation.[xxi] The lesson is particularly valuable at a
time when economic sanctions seem to be taking on ever greater importance as a
tool of American policy.
The US-Soviet
Crisis of 1962
The
Cuban Missile Crisis is the canonical case of successful crisis management in
the classic Cold War mode, and in many respects contrasts favorably with
American blundering prior to Pearl Harbor.
The administration of John F. Kennedy was seized with the gravity of the
risk and the need to handle matters deliberately and with maximum control from
the top. Advice was sought and
decisions communicated through multiple channels, orchestrated by a single
extraordinary advisory committee in which the president himself took an active
role. In contrast to Roosevelt, Kennedy
was highly sensitive to the possibility of war erupting by miscalculation (he
had recently read Barbara Tuchman’s account of the July Crisis of 1914), and
was determined this would not occur. At
the same time, however, it is clear in retrospect that American management of
the crisis was far from perfect.
The
basic outlines of the crisis are well known.
In August 1962, the Soviet Union had begun a clandestine effort to
establish a major military presence in Castro’s Cuba, involving significant
numbers of Soviet troops and conventional armaments as well as aircraft and
missiles of various kinds. In spite of
assurances from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as to the purely defensive
intention of this buildup and a public warning by President Kennedy in
September as its dimensions became clearer, American intelligence was able to
report on October 16 that the Soviets were emplacing on the island
nuclear-tipped medium- and intermediate-range missiles capable of striking
targets virtually anywhere in the continental United States.
The
crisis proper unfolded over the next thirteen days. Assisted by an ad hoc advisory group that would be designated the
“Executive Committee of the National Security Council” or simply “Ex Comm,”
President Kennedy spent much of this period personally engaged in refining and
weighing options for responding to the Soviet move. On October 21, the president settled on a naval blockade of Cuba
rather than any form of direct military action, as urged by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff as well as some influential civilian advisers. When the blockade was put into effect on October 24, American
nuclear forces were placed at DEFCON 2, the highest alert status short of
actual war ─ the only time this was done during the Cold War. The Soviets declined to challenge the
blockade, and on October 26, faced with American warnings of imminent military
action against the missiles already in place, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a message
offering to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a pledge by the United States
not to use force against Cuba. The day
following, considerable confusion was introduced by a second Khrushchev message
that upped the ante by proposing that
the United States also withdraw the comparable Jupiter missiles it had recently
deployed in Turkey. In the standard version, at any rate, the president
eventually decided to ignore the second message and accept the original
proposal (though the missiles already deployed in Turkey and at other European
sites would shortly be removed in any case).
The Soviets went along, and the crisis was on its way to resolution.
Important
new perspectives on the crisis have been gained, however, from Soviet records
and the recollections of former high-ranking officials on both sides, as well
as from recently published transcriptions of tape-recordings of Ex Comm
deliberations. What emerges is a
picture rather less flattering to the Kennedy administration than the familiar
one. That the outcome of the crisis was
a signal victory for the United States is undeniable. But it is also clear that the United States was playing a very
strong hand, and against an opponent that blundered badly at critical
junctures. In retrospect, what is
noteworthy is not the outcome but how close the president came to snatching
defeat from the jaws of victory.[xxii]
Like
all crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis must be evaluated in its larger strategic
and political context. The abortive
American-sponsored invasion of Cuba in April 1961 had revealed the hand of a
president unsure of himself and overly fearful of a Soviet response. In June 1961, Kennedy met Khrushchev in
Vienna, and used the opportunity to lecture the Soviet leader on the dangers of
military rivalry and the need to avoid the “miscalculations” that had led the
European powers into World War I.[xxiii] In the process, he offered the observation
that “we regard...Sino-Soviet forces and the forces of the United States and
Western Europe as being more or less in balance” ─ a gratuitous (and
astonishingly inaccurate) poor-mouthing of American military capabilities.[xxiv]
In the face of Khrushchev’s intransigent posturing, Kennedy also managed to
distance himself from his predecessors, admit errors in his own policies, and
allude to his domestic political weakness.
It is hardly surprising that Khrushchev went away from this encounter
with a strong impression of the president as young, weak, overly intellectual,
and “not prepared well for decision making in crisis situations.”[xxv] Khrushchev’s actions over the next year
─ new threats over Berlin and the building of the Berlin Wall, the
resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, and the decision to send arms to
Cuba ─ evidently flowed from this assessment of Kennedy’s personal
failings and the scope it afforded Khrushchev for a strategy of bullying and
bluff.
Such a strategy was in fact nothing
new. The Soviet leadership had for a
number of years carried on a well-orchestrated deception campaign to inflate US
perceptions of Soviet nuclear weapons capabilities, giving rise to the notion
of a “missile gap” that was exploited by Kennedy against Nixon in the election
of 1960. The advent of photo-
reconnaissance satellites allowed American intelligence to explode the missile
gap myth in the spring of 1961, but the administration as a whole seems never
to have grasped or at any rate intellectually digested the actual extent of
American nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union at this time, or the motives
of Soviet leaders in perpetrating this apparently reckless fraud. In particular, President Kennedy himself
seems to have consistently overestimated the military and political strength of
the Soviet Union, while having little feel for the Leninist political style of the
Soviet leadership or of Nikita Khrushchev in particular.
In the course of the Ex Comm discussions,
the question of the purpose of deploying the missiles in Cuba was raised by the
president himself in a way that shows he did not believe they were militarily
significant; this view seems also to have been shared by Secretary of Defense
McNamara.[xxvi] In fact, the missiles slated for deployment
in Cuba would have doubled or tripled
the number of Soviet ground-based missiles capable of reaching the United States,
and because of their short flight times, would have constituted a particular
threat to the American strategic bomber force as well as other critical
military and civilian targets. While
not providing the Soviets with anything approaching a disarming first strike
capability, they would have posed for the first time a credible threat of
inflicting unacceptable levels of damage on American nuclear forces and the
American homeland. As such, they would
have contributed in a major way to neutralizing the political if not the
military effects of American nuclear superiority.[xxvii]
These facts make more
understandable, if they do not fully justify, the bellicose reactions of most
of the American military leadership during the crisis. What seems clear from the record is that the
president did everything in his power to avoid using force or being placed in a
situation where force might prove necessary, even at the cost of palpable
strategic disadvantage, because of his underlying conviction of the
unacceptable risk in any US-Soviet nuclear exchange. At the same time, Kennedy was aware that this conviction did not
mirror the mood of the country (or indeed of his own advisers, and not merely
those in uniform), and that a failure to react strongly to Soviet provocations
could cause him grave political damage.
In fact, it can be argued that the only reason the missile crisis ever
occurred in the way it did is that the president felt it necessary, in a
statement in early September, to draw an explicit line in the sand warning the
Soviets against deployment of offensive missiles in Cuba ─ as a way of
deflecting public criticism of the administration for its failure to react to
the broader Soviet buildup there. As
one of Kennedy’s close aides later noted, “the President drew the line
precisely where he thought the Soviets would not be.…If we had known that the
Soviets were putting forty missiles into Cuba, we might under this hypothesis
have drawn the line at one hundred, and said with great fanfare that we would
absolutely not tolerate the presence of more than one hundred missiles in
Cuba.”[xxviii] The point is that Kennedy seems to have been
guided throughout the crisis not by any real strategic analysis, but by his
instinct for the softest option consistent with his own and his
administration’s political survival.[xxix]
This
is strikingly confirmed by the best kept secret of the crisis ─ the
president’s use of the Jupiter missiles as a bargaining chip to ensure a Soviet
retreat on Cuba.[xxx] In a private meeting late on October 28
between the president’s brother Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly
Dobrinin, assurances were given that the American Jupiters recently deployed in
Turkey and Italy under NATO auspices would be withdrawn after a short interval,
provided this was not publicly acknowledged as part of the settlement. Only six members of the president’s inner
circle were aware of this aspect of the American position. But there is almost certainly more to the
story. While it remains unclear what
prompted Khrushchev to send the second letter on October 28 raising the Jupiter
issue, there is every reason to believe that it was in reaction to events in
Washington. Ambassador Dobrinin has
claimed that Robert Kennedy floated the idea of a trade in a private meeting on
the evening of October 27. Word that
such an idea was being actively considered in Washington had reached Khrushchev
through a Walter Lippmann column of October 25, and probably as well through a
report from a Soviet intelligence officer with links to Robert Kennedy.[xxxi]
While
the Jupiter missiles were of limited military utility, their strategic and
political significance for the NATO alliance was very considerable. It goes without saying that NATO and the
Turks were kept in the dark about the bargain over these missiles, though their
eventual withdrawal cannot but have aroused European suspicions and deepened
doubts about the US nuclear guarantee to Europe that persisted throughout the
Cold War. In the event, the administration
was able to maintain enough secrecy surrounding the deal and to minimize the
political damage it could have caused (though a contingency plan involving the
United Nations was also prepared in the event it became public knowledge). But was the bargain really necessary? Were the risks it plainly involved properly
weighed?
Opinions
will differ on the wisdom of the president’s maneuver, but it is hard to deny
that it was symptomatic of larger flaws in his own performance and in the
functioning of the Ex Comm throughout the crisis. Little thought seems to
have been given by the president or any of his advisers to the larger issue of
the American alliance system and the impact of the crisis on it. This is not
surprising, however, in view of the relentlessly tactical focus of most of the
Ex Comm discussions. One of the
problems of the missile trade idea was that it ignored the asymmetrical
requirements of nuclear deterrence and forward presence for the United States
because of its commitment to the security of Western Europe. But there was very little discussion of the
basics of US and Soviet nuclear strategies and force structures and their
interrelationships. While it is not
entirely fair to blame the president for the failure of key advisers
(especially secretaries Rusk and McNamara and national security adviser
McGeorge Bundy) to focus the Ex Comm discussions more effectively, he was
ultimately the one responsible for a process that on close inspection plainly
lacked adequate structure and discipline.
Kennedy’s private outburst to Rusk on October 29 over the inadequacy of
State Department planning on the Turkish issue[xxxii]
only underlines the absence of strategic focus in the Ex Comm as a whole.
But perhaps the most serious strategic error
of the American side during the crisis was its cavalier dismissal of the
significance of the larger Soviet military presence in Cuba and its longer term
implications for the security of the western hemisphere. The administration acted as if no important concession
had been made in offering a no-invasion pledge of Cuba. Yet since its beginning, the same
administration had been obsessed with Fidel Castro’s regime and the threat it
posed to American interests throughout Latin America, and had seriously considered
removing him by overt as well as covert means.
Clearly, Castro’s ever stronger Soviet connection only made matters
worse. Quite apart from the nuclear
question, Soviet military patronage of the Cubans ─ including the
presence of large numbers of Soviet advisers and even combat troops ─ arguably
constituted the most serious challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in its entire
history. Yet the administration was
prepared to wink at all of this in order to ensure a Soviet retreat on nuclear
missiles. Indeed, so fixated was it on
the missiles themselves that it failed to focus until awkwardly late in the
crisis on the status and fate of nuclear-capable Soviet aircraft ─
notably, the forty-some IL-28 medium-range bombers already deployed to Cuba,
which posed a threat not much inferior to the missiles themselves. Though the Soviets were finally prevailed
upon to withdraw the IL-28s, the Soviet political and military commitment to
Cuba not only survived the crisis but was legitimized by it.[xxxiii]
The Crisis in
the Gulf, 1990-1991
On
August 2, 1990, the first elements of what would become an invasion force of
some 140,000 Iraqi troops poured across the Kuwait border, surprising not only
the Kuwaitis and their Arab neighbors but the United States. Contrary, apparently, to the expectations of
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the United States decided to resist this act of
unvarnished aggression. Over the next
several months, it was able to organize a grand coalition of states under
United Nations auspices, and to engineer an unprecedented buildup of American
military forces in the Persian Gulf.
When Saddam refused to heed an ultimatum of the UN Security Council to
withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, the coalition launched a devastating
air campaign against Iraqi forces as well as strategic targets throughout the
country. A subsequent ground assault
rolled up the Iraqi army in the Kuwait area in 100 hours, leaving allied forces
astride the road to Baghdad and igniting widespread rebellion against a regime
that seemed on its last legs. In the
final surprise of this saga, however, Saddam Hussein was able to survive
defeat, restore his regime’s authority in the face of what was to become
virtually a United Nations protectorate in the northern third of the country as
well as severe economic sanctions, reconstitute his military power in
significant part, and reemerge as a legitimate leader and a regional power
broker, while the United States would become increasingly isolated and
marginalized in spite of its continuing military presence in the Gulf. While the US won the battle in 1991, Saddam
seemed well positioned to win the long-term war.
Though
not regularly discussed in these terms, the “Desert Shield” period of the Gulf
conflict (August 1990 ─ January 1991) was nonetheless a crisis by
anyone’s defi- nition, and a good case can be made for considering in the same
light the six months or so preceding the Iraqi invasion.[xxxiv] There are important lessons to be drawn for
crisis management from this initial period, including the run-up to the
invasion itself. For our purposes,
though, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the conflict as a whole is the
failure of the coalition, but especially the United States, to manage
effectively the war’s final stage and to put its strategic imprint on the
post-war Middle East.
President
George Bush has deservedly won admiration as the architect of the coalition’s
triumph and commander-in-chief of the most formidable American expeditionary
force since World War II. Under his
personal leadership, the United States launched a highly effective diplomatic
effort to assemble moral and material support and a regional base for
opposition to Saddam, and used its growing military presence in the Gulf region
first to deter a further Iraqi advance, then to pressure the Iraqis to
withdraw. Yet this classic “coercive
diplomacy” was never more than a sideshow in American policy, which accepted
relatively early the likelihood (and strategic desirability) of a major
military clash and was more concerned with preparing for war than exploring all
avenues for a peaceful solution. The
key challenge for the United States, and President Bush in particular, was to
fend off political pressures both at home and abroad to follow the script of
Cold War crisis management.
This
the president succeeded in doing, but only with considerable difficulty. The administration was late and inarticulate
in describing American aims in the Gulf, and came very close to losing a
crucial vote in the US Senate as a result of its maladroit handling of the congressional
leadership throughout the period of the buildup.[xxxv] These failures in the political and public
relations arena were offset to a significant extent, however, by the very
effective handling of media coverage of the crisis by military officers in the
field and the Pentagon generally. As
the first war ever covered in real time by television, the Gulf War underscored
the importance of the information dimension of contemporary crises and the need
for a systematic and coordinated approach to dealing with it.
If
the strengths of the Bush administration were most in evidence when the Gulf
conflict was at its height, its weaknesses, which have emerged with greater
clarity as we gain distance from the event, can be seen especially in the
initial and final phases. There can be
little question that the president and other senior administration officials
(notably Secretary of State James Baker) misread the situation in Iraq
following the Iran-Iraq war, failed to take seriously the many indicators in
early 1990 that Saddam was bent on challenging the regional status quo, and
pursued an overly conciliatory policy that had the effect of persuading Saddam
that the United States would under no circumstances intervene militarily to
protect Kuwait. Although the horrors of
his regime were hardly a secret, Saddam was not perceived by most senior
American officials as qualitatively different from other Middle Eastern
strongmen. In part, this reflected
deficiencies in American intelligence, but more importantly, it pointed to a
fundamental failure of political imagination.
Bush and Baker both regarded Saddam as a man with whom they could do
business, rather than as a paranoid thug who harbored dreams of a revived
Babylonian Empire.[xxxvi]
The
American experience during the Gulf War well illustrates the fundamental truth
that crises contain opportunity as well as danger. The Gulf War as a whole was
a true “crisis” in the sense of a turning point in international affairs,
affording the United States in particular manifold opportunities to strengthen
its diplomatic and military position in the Middle East, complete the
rehabilitation of the American armed forces as an instrument of national power
in the aftermath of the Vietnam era, and lay the foundations for a “new world
order” that would replace the structures and habits of the Cold War. In retrospect, it is clear that such
opportunities were only partially perceived and imperfectly pursued, to the
extent they were pursued at all. While
certainly reflecting the particular limitations of the Bush administration,
this also testifies to the persistence of a fundamentally astrategic American
approach to the management of crises.
But
the single greatest failure of crisis management in the Gulf conflict occurred at
the end and in the immediate aftermath of coalition military operations. As argued earlier, though the notion runs
contrary to the conventions of current thought, the end and immediate aftermath
of wars deserve to be considered crises in the operationally precise meaning of
the term, for they demand the reinvolvement of supreme civilian authority in
national decision making in order to balance the requirements of the military
endgame with postwar political arrangements.
At the end of the Gulf War, errors on the military as well as the
civilian side compounded American decision making failure and laid the
groundwork for the flawed strategic outcome of that conflict that has become
increasingly obvious in the intervening years.[xxxvii]
The
outlook of the American military leadership at this time, as articulated
especially by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, was
decisively shaped by the experience of failure in the war in Vietnam. The lessons of Vietnam were thought to be,
first, that any application of force by the United States should be massive
rather than limited or incremental, geared to overwhelming the enemy and
bringing the conflict to a rapid conclusion; and second, that wars should be
run by the uniformed military ─ better, by the commander on the spot
─ without second-guessing or micromanagement by higher authority. This thinking, which was accepted with few
reservations by the Bush administration as a whole, was faithfully reflected in
the preparations for and conduct of the Gulf War, and seemed to be vindicated
by the outcome. The theater commander,
Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, had unusual freedom to plan and execute overall US
military strategy in the region, with results that exceeded virtually all
expectations. Unfortunately, both
Schwartzkopf and his superiors in Washington failed to recognize the point at
which military considerations should have taken second place to larger
requirements of US policy.
The
self-imposed ceasefire, fixed (in part for dubious symbolic reasons) at one
hundred hours from the beginning of the ground campaign, was the first major
mistake. While this decision was not
solely a military one (it reflected high-level administration concern that
pursuit of fleeing Iraqi troops along the “highway of death” was turning into a
public relations debacle), it was driven in great measure by the desire of the
military leadership to declare victory and disengage before being drawn into a
Vietnam-like “quagmire” of low-intensity conflict. The immediate effect of the ceasefire was to prevent American
field commanders from closing the ring on the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions,
the mainstay of Saddam’s regime and the core of his military strength, whose
destruction had been a key coalition objective. More broadly, the ceasefire deprived the United States of the
option of ratcheting up the pressure on Saddam’s regime and threatening his
personal tenure in office by advancing on major Iraqi population centers,
particularly Baghdad and Basra. It also
confirmed that the coalition had little interest in active support of the
revolts in Kurdistan and the Shi’ite region of southern Iraq, then in full
swing in no small measure because of words of encouragement pronounced by the
president himself.
The
second major error had to do with the ceasefire talks between Gen. Schwartzkopf
and senior Iraqi commanders held shortly thereafter at the town of Safwan. Lacking any instructions from Washington and
with no civilian presence on his delegation, Schwartzkopf treated his Iraqi
opposites with a chivalry and forebearance that was at best absurdly
inappropriate. He threw away whatever
leverage the coalition presence in Iraq might have been able to exert by
promising unilaterally an immediate withdrawal from all Iraqi territory; and
his casual and gratuitous exemption of helicopters from a ban he imposed on the
use of Iraqi military aircraft led directly to their employment in the
suppression of Saddam’s internal enemies.
There
is surely a legitimate argument to be made in favor of the broad strategy the
US pursued at the end of the Gulf War.
Even if Baghdad had been threatened, it is not certain that Saddam’s
regime would have fallen; and there were strong political constraints imposed
on US action not only by the fragility of the coalition (its Arab members in
particular had little stomach for an intrusive or semi-permanent US military
presence in Iraq) but by the formal mandate bestowed by the United Nations
Security Council. In addition, the
implications of a breakup of the Iraqi state for the stability of the region
could not safely be ignored, and the Saudis in particular were intensely
concerned over the potential for a greatly expanded Iranian role. Still, it is hard not to conclude that the
US squandered significant opportunities in the aftermath of the coalition
victory. The US military bowed out of
the conflict before any real pressures were brought to bear to halt military
operations, and the American push for a military ceasefire prior to the
resolution of any of the political issues raised by the war has to be
considered a classic case of crisis mismanagement. While no one knows whether added coalition pressure would have
led to the downfall of Saddam Hussein, it is certain that the failure of the
American government during this critical period to look beyond the crisis
contributed importantly not only to the survival of Saddam’s regime but to the
contraction of the political space for American diplomacy throughout the region
in succeeding years.
How
should one think about crisis management in the current international
environment? What remains valid and
what is obsolete in the theory and practice of crisis management during the
Cold War? What are the implications of
all of this for the institutional handling of crises by governments and their
leaders today?
As
our case studies suggest, there is a broad continuity in the requirements for
intelligent crisis management. Crises
require the sustained attention of the national leadership, a working mastery
of an array of instruments of statecraft, orderly processes of information
gathering and analysis, an unprejudiced and probing review of available
options, sensitivity to the opponent, timely decisions, and careful coordination
and control of their implementation.
Above all else, though, they require strategic vision and political
competence.
It was argued earlier that the
peculiar circumstances of the Cold War served in a number of ways to distort
the idea of crisis management. The
nuclear allergy encouraged the belief that the prevention of war is the
overriding purpose of crisis management generally and that political and
military operational needs in crises are necessarily in tension. It further encouraged the identification of
crises generally with situations involving a risk of nuclear war, emphasizing
thereby the discontinuities between crisis environments and ordinary policy
making and the centrality of the military component of crisis decision making.
Crises
today, to repeat what was said at the outset, are everywhere and nowhere. For the major powers at any rate, the
relative decline in external threats of all sorts, coupled with the increasing
demands of multilateral political-military operations, create what one might
call an environment of pseudo-crises, in which governments are constantly
agitated by events but lack sufficient incentives for rapid and strategically
coherent decision making.[xxxviii]
Much
of the change in the contemporary strategic environment has to do with the
greatly enhanced role of the Western (but particularly the American) media in
defining crisis situations and forcing governments to react to them. As indicated earlier, the psychological-political
dimension of crises has always been an important one ─ more important, in
fact, than has been generally recognized in classic crisis management
theory. Public statements by
government officials have usually figured prominently in the handling of
crises, and independent news media have served as a crucial source of factual
information as well as an interpreter of crisis-related events. In the current era, the
psychological-political dimension of international conflict is even more
central than it was in the strategic environment of the Cold War. New technologies and global media
organizations such as CNN have revolutionized not only the reporting of
international crises but the interactions of governments in crises. The Kurdish exodus from Iraq at the end of
the Gulf War and the Somali famine and civil war of 1992-1994 are classic
instances of humanitarian “crises” driven and indeed defined primarily by media
pressure. And the Gulf War itself well
illustrates the challenges involved in waging the kind of limited or
constrained warfare that is likely to be the rule in coming decades ─
warfare undertaken in a glare of publicity in which unaccustomed factors such
as human rights outrages and environmental concerns can unexpectedly assume
great political importance. In such an
environment, it is harder than ever for governments to maintain a strategic
perspective.
The problem
of the post-Cold War security environment from the perspective of crisis
management may be said to be the relaxed level of tensions between all the
major powers. The effect of this is to
widen the gap between normal and crisis modes of national security decision
making, making it more difficult both to anticipate crises and to take them
seriously as they develop. A related problem
has to do with the relatively diminished level of strategic-cultural knowledge
of potential opponents in a world in which real conflict seems increasingly
remote. In spite of a certain proneness to mirror-imaging analysis, the
American preoccupation with understanding the Soviet adversary during the Cold
War was intense, and Americans and Soviets both gained valuable experience over
the years in dealing with one another in crisis-related situations. With much lowered incentives, the United
States cannot be expected to bring to bear the same level of intelligence
attention or comparably sophisticated strategic assessments against the
hypothetical adversaries of today. The
extent to which American intelligence was surprised by the Indian nuclear tests
of spring 1998 shows how little can now be taken for granted in this
regard. More importantly, our current
political leaders cannot be expected to play the same central role in
international crises as their predecessors.
Indeed, given their preparation and proclivities, they probably ought
not to be encouraged to even if they were so inclined.
What
all of this seems to point to is the need for carefully staffed and structured
crisis management mechanisms that can operate to some extent independently of
top government leaders, yet at the same time be more closely integrated with
national policy and strategic decision making generally. Such mechanisms should take full advantage
of the ongoing revolution in computer and communications technologies to
develop sophisticated data bases that can improve crisis prediction,
identification and analysis as well as the operational aspects of crisis
management; and they should be designed to couple core staffs as tightly as
possible with responsible agency officials, operators in the field, comparable
units in other governments and nongovernmental organizations, and experts and
other resources in the private sector.
While it is obviously unworkable and undesirable to have wholly
autonomous crisis management capabilities in governments (or anywhere else),
the American experience shows that there are also penalties to be paid in
thrusting senior policy officials into the crisis management role, given the
virtually inevitable lack of real preparation one should expect in such
individuals and the steepness of the learning curve. The key requirement is to devise doctrine and procedures that
will integrate political, strategic, and operational/crisis perspectives while
preserving an appropriate balance among them.
It was
only at a late stage in the Cold War that the United States approached having a
system of the sort just described. In
the early postwar years, crisis management in the White House was relatively
informal and for the most part quite distinct from the process of national
strategic planning carried out under the auspices of the National Security
Council (NSC). With the sharp decline
in the importance of the NSC system in the Kennedy-Johnson era, political and
operational perspectives tended to dominate crisis management. In the Nixon administration, a crisis
management committee (the “Washington Special Actions Group”) was established
within a revived NSC system in order to address what were seen to be serious
deficiencies in US government performance in this area, and proved to be
reasonably effective. However, it was
not until the first Reagan administration that an effort was made to create a
dedicated crisis management organization in the White House. What eventually became the Crisis Management
Center (CMC) was an innovative undertaking intended to integrate intelligence,
policy, and operational concerns from the vantage point of presidential
decision making, utilizing for the first time advanced information processing
and communications capabilities that were to be fully linked with key agencies
and information resources throughout the US government. The CMC, with a substantial staff of its own
but closely integrated with the staff and operations of the National Security
Council, became fully functional in mid-1983 and played an important role in a
number of crises over the next several years.
Unfortunately, it never succeeded in carving out a secure bureaucratic
niche, and eventually fell victim to the Iran-Contra scandal, which caused the
White House to pull back from anything that could be perceived as an
“operational” role in national security decision making.
In
more recent years, the pendulum has begun to reverse direction in response to
widely felt deficiencies in American policy and operations during the
protracted crises in Somalia and Bosnia, with the NSC staff reasserting a
central role in managing the interagency decision process in what are now often
referred to as “complex contingencies.” Nevertheless, all of this falls well
short of a national crisis management capability of the kind the United States
possessed briefly in the 1980s.
At
the operational level, the great challenge for crisis management remains the
disciplined and rapid coordination and integration of diverse governmental
functions. The post Cold War strategic
environment has if anything ─ contrary to what one might at first suppose
─ sharpened the problem of
interagency coordination in crises, precisely by reducing the salience of
crisis issues for political leaders and central administrative staffs. Under such circumstances, agencies tend to
be left alone to operate according to bureaucratic imperatives and routine
procedures. This is particularly true
of military organizations, which tend to be especially jealous of their
organizational integrity. But in an
environment in which force can no longer be assumed to be the crucial instrument of crisis management, one in which military
units are frequently expected to operate in subordinate roles in unfamiliar
civilian contexts, crisis operations must increasingly involve not only the
coordination but the active integration
of civilian and military personnel and functions. Yet who is to do the integration, and more importantly, by what
criteria?
The
history of UN and NATO intervention in the Bosnian conflict is a clear
demonstration of the continuing inadequacy of multilateral crisis operations in
this vital area. While ad hoc efforts
(particularly in and after the Gulf War as well as in Somalia) to foster
civil-military integration have had some success, there is as yet insufficient
awareness of the fundamental character of the problem. Unfortunately, the downsizing experienced by
most Western military establishments over the last decade has all too often
resulted in a drastic reduction in just those capabilities ─ special
forces, foreign area and language qualified officers, civil affairs
specialists, and the like ─ that are most needed and best suited for
contemporary crisis operations. The
example of highly effective organizations such as the Kuwait Task Force of
1990-1991 shows that hybrid civil-military structures can work well under the
pressure of circumstances. What is
needed now is a systematic effort on the part of the United States as well as
its multilateral partners to develop interagency doctrine and associated
command and control arrangements that would permit their routine use in post
Cold War crises.
It
must again be emphasized, however, that non-military factors will almost
certainly continue to gain in importance in the management of contemporary
crises. Domestic politics and public
relations, public diplomacy, economics, and law-enforcement will likely all
require increased attention in the handling of crises in the emerging security
environment. Ways will have to be
devised not only to better integrate these functions operationally with the
more traditional instruments of statecraft, but also ─ and more
importantly ─ to recast them in a more strategic form than they generally assume in the routine world of
government bureaucracy. This is a
challenge that should not be underestimated.
That crisis management is
preeminently a mode of strategy, not an alternative to it, has been a major
theme of the argument developed here. A
fully adequate account of crisis management in the contemporary world would
have to address an array of fundamental strategic issues which have been
treated here only in passing if at all.
Perhaps the most important practical lesson emerging from the foregoing
analysis is the need for crisis management to be seen and to function as an
extension of national strategic decision making processes rather than as an
improvised substitute for them.
[i]Cited (from Congressional testimony) in
Coral Bell, The Conventions of Crisis
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 2.
[ii]For a pointed critique of academic crisis
management theorizing, see Adam M. Garfinkle, “Crisis Decision Making: The
Banality of Theory,” Orbis (Spring
1986): 12-41.
[iii]But the Israeli case is also of very
general interest. David Wurmser, “Why
Israel Wins Battles But Loses the Peace,” IASPS
Research Papers in Strategy, 6 (1998), argues that Israel’s Labor-Zionist
elites have rejected strategy on principle and concentrated on surviving crises
because they believed that the nation’s fundamental problems would eventually
be overcome in the course of the progress of
humanity toward socialism. The
astrategic orientation of Israeli national security policy making is well analyzed
in Yehuda Ben-Meir, “National Security Decision Making: The Israeli Case,” Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, No.
8 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986).
[iv]A similar argument is made by Bell, Conventions of Crisis, pp. 1-15.
[v]Kennedy broke new ground when he spoke by
telephone with an on-scene commander of US ground forces in the Berlin Corridor
in 1961. Lyndon Johnson famously
plotted bombing raids against North Vietnam on the floor of the Oval Office.
[vi]This argument is developed by Eliot A.
Cohen, “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,” The National Interest, 6 (1986): 3-13.
[vii]Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision
Making, and System Structure in International Crises (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), p. 6.
[viii]Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 2-3. This
is the final product of the two-decade long International Crisis Behavior Project,
now covering 412 international crises and 895 foreign policy crises (for
individual states) over the period 1918-1994.
[ix]Yehezkal Dror, Policymaking Under Adversity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1986); see especially the brief discussion of crisis, pp. 180-184.
[x]On protracted conflict and its
significance for the study of crisis, see Brecher and Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, pp. 5-7, and Michael
Brecher, “International Crises and Protracted Conflicts,” International Interactions A Study of Crisis 11, (1984):
237-297.
[xi]See especially Thomas Halper, Foreign Policy Crises: Appearance and
Reality in Decision Making (Columbus, OH: Charles S. Merrill, 1971); Denise
M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the
Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1994); and Patrick J. Haney, Organizing
for Foreign Policy Crises (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
[xii]As Haney, Organizing, pp. 143-145, notes, the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964
well illustrates the constructed or pseudo-crisis, while the Cienfuegos
submarine base episode of 1970 shows how a genuine or potentially serious
crisis can be suppressed by conscious political choice. On this interesting but largely forgotten
history see Raymond L. Garthoff, “Handling the Cienfuegos Crisis,” International Security 8, (Summer 1983):
46-66.
[xiii]Notably, Alexander L. George and those
influenced by him. For a succinct
statement see George, “Crisis Management: Political and Military
Considerations,” Survival 26,
(September/October 1984): 223-234.
[xiv]Joseph F. Bouchard’s study of American naval operations during past crises, Command in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), provides a wealth of detail suggesting that military commanders from the 1950s onward have been more sensitive to political and diplomatic requirements and more prudent in handling local situations than crisis management theory would lead one to imagine. The notion that distortions in decision making arising from bureaucratic interests and organizational routines constitute the problem of crisis management may be traced to the influence of Graham Allison’s well-known study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
[xv]Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow,
eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White
House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
[xvi]See Lawrence Freedman and Virginia
Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The
Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991),
pp. 147-149.
[xvii]Richard G. Head, Frisco W. Short, and Robert C. McFarlane, Crisis Resolution: Presidential Decision-Making in the “Mayaguez” and Korean Confrontations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978), pp. 2-3.
[xviii]For a critique of this brand of strategic
theorizing see, for example, Colin S. Gray, War,
Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
[xix]For the larger view of Roosevelt taken
here, as well as the specific argument concerning Japan, see the compelling
revisionist account of Frederick W. Marks III, Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1988). The
standard version is perhaps best represented by Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign
Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
[xx]See the extended analysis of Marks, Wind Over Sand, ch. 7.
[xxi]See Scott D. Sagan, “From Deterrence to Coercion
to War: The Road to Pearl Harbor,” in Alexander L. George and William E.
Simons, eds., The Limits of Coercive
Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), ch. 4.
[xxii]May and Zelikow, ed., The Kennedy Tapes, (with extended
commentary) is indispensable for the American side; see also McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb
in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), and James A.
Nathan, ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis
Revisited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Much new light is shed on Soviet decision making by Aleksandr
Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell
of a Gamble:” Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997). A trenchant critical
account, to which the present discussion is much indebted, is Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation
of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), ch. 5; see also Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev
1960-1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
[xxiii]Khrushchev’s reaction is worth
noting. According to Kennedy’s own
account, “Khrushchev went berserk. He
started yelling, ‘Miscalculations! Miscalculations! Miscalculations! All I ever hear from your people and your news
correspondents and your friends in Europe and everyplace else is that damned
word ‘miscalculation’! You ought to
take that word and bury it in cold storage and never use it again! I’m sick of it.’ It was a vague Western concept and just another ‘clever way of
making threats.’” (quoted in Kagan, On
the Origins, pp. 468-469).
[xxiv]The Joint Chiefs of Staff were reportedly
furious when this remark was reported to them (Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 202).
[xxv]The characterization is that of Fyodor
Burlatsky, a former Soviet official who was present at Khrushchev’s debriefing
after the summit (quoted in Kagan, On the
Origins, pp. 475-476).
[xxvi]May and Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes, pp. 89-92.
[xxvii]The Soviet deployment in Cuba amounted to
forty MRBM/IRBM launchers and missiles, with an additional twenty missiles in ready
reserve. US intelligence estimates of
the size of the Soviet ICBM force showed in decline throughout 1961, finally
reaching the range of only ten to
twenty-five missiles; these were at unhardened sites and were slow and
difficult to launch (Beschloss, The
Crisis Years, pp. 65, 328); by October 1962, the best American estimates
hovered between twenty-five and forty-five ICBMs, though an authoritative
Soviet source has since revealed that the true number was only twenty ─
by contrast, the United States had 170 ICBM launchers at this time (Raymond
Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban
Missile Crisis [Washington, D.C., 1989], pp. 206-208). The planned Soviet deployment also included
forty-two IL-28 light bombers and a submarine facility that would support seven
nuclear missile submarines on permanent patrol in US waters, each equipped with
three ballistic missiles with one megaton warheads, as well as tactical nuclear
missiles for coastal defense (Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” pp. 188-189) ─ a not inconsiderable
additional nuclear force. Compare the
discussion in Bundy, Danger and Survival pp.
445-453.
[xxviii]Theodore Sorensen, as quoted in Kagan, On the Origins, p. 503.
[xxix]The role of political calculation in the
president’s handling of the crisis has been increasingly acknowledged by
responsible analysts. See, for example,
Richard Ned Lebow, “The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations
Reevaluated: Why Was Cuba a Crisis?” in Nathan, ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 161-186.
[xxx]The best account of this issue and its
larger implications is Barton J. Bernstein, “Reconsidering the Missile Crisis:
Dealing with the Problems of the American Jupiters in Turkey,” in ibid., pp.
55-129.
[xxxi]The extraordinary story of the
long-standing personal relationship between the president’s brother and Georgi
Bolshakov, a Soviet GRU officer stationed in Washington, as recounted in detail
by Fursenko and Naftali, raises important issues concerning the use of
irregular channels of communication by top policy makers in crises and
otherwise. It is possible that
Khrushchev was decisively influenced on the Turkish missile issue by a GRU
report that reached Moscow on October 25 (Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” pp. 248-252,
272-273).
[xxxii]May and Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes, pp. 659-670, 697-698.
[xxxiii]It is instructive to consider briefly the
contrast between American and Soviet behavior during the Cuban crisis. While it is fair enough to say that Moscow’s
handling of the situation during the final weeks comes close to providing a
“model of how not to make sensible decisions” in crises (May and Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes, p. 696), one also needs to recognize that Khrushchev
was pursuing a large strategy that, for all its boldness, was coherent, well
calculated, and in the event not wholly unsuccessful. Soviet strategy would have been reckless only if Khrushchev had
wholly misjudged his American counterpart; but this is by no means so clear as
is commonly assumed. Where his
strategic assessment failed was in his understanding of the institutional and
political constraints on the president ─ and not least, the hawkish
instincts of the most influential of Kennedy’s own advisors. But it was the operational inadequacies of
Soviet crisis management that were to prove decisive in the Soviet defeat. Throughout the crisis, Soviet intelligence
as well as operational analysis and planning were poor or nonexistent, partly
reflecting the absence of any special institutional mechanism to support crisis
decision making in Moscow. Like FDR,
Khrushchev was his own crisis manager, with the result that decisions were
often made impetuously and without consideration of a full range of policy
options. Khrushchev’s biggest mistake
may have been his failure to link Cuba with Berlin (as suggested by Ambassador
Dobrinin among others), given its neuralgic value for the Kennedy
administration and particularly the president himself (consider Kagan, On the Origins, pp. 476-493).
[xxxiv] See particularly Ken Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International
Relations (London: Routledge, 1993), chs. 2 and 4. Another useful account of the war as a whole
is Lawrence Freedman and Ephraim Karsh, The
Gulf Conflict, 1990-1991 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993). Insight into high-level US
decision making can be gained from Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), and Michael R.
Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The
Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little Brown, 1995).
[xxxv] David R. Gergen, “The Unfettered
Presidency,” in Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Roger K. Smith, eds., After the Storm: Lessons from the Gulf War
(Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992), ch. 7.
[xxxvi] See especially Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and
Saddam, 1982-1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). There can be little question but that the US ambassador to Iraq
at the time, April Glaspie, was essentially reflecting American policy in her
unfortunate meeting with Saddam shortly before the invasion. At the same time, the performance was
extraordinarily inept, and underlines the extent to which crisis diplomacy
needs to be conceived in terms quite different from day-to-day diplomacy. Saddam should have been bullied by a special
envoy with the appropriate standing, personality, and experience (Gen. Vernon
Walters is the classic of this genre).
[xxxvii] The best account is Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, ch. 20.
[xxxviii]In an important sense, the real threats
to contemporary states are now internal more than external. The most serious
crisis facing Russia in the new era, for example, has been the attempted
secession of the Chechen republic, not the projected expansion of NATO to the
east ─ something that would never have been predicted by statesmen
conditioned by the Cold War paradigm of crisis management. In the United States, the Iran-Contra
scandal of the late 1980s was a much more threatening crisis from the point of view
of the Reagan administration’s ability to govern or to project American power
abroad than Poland in 1981-1982, Lebanon in 1983, or any other international
crisis on its watch. Yet neither
governments nor academic analysts have been notably sensitive to this shift,
and little seems to have been done to rethink operational crisis management
requirements in its light.