After Iraq: U.S. Diplomacy and the Crisis of International Legitimacy I'm happy to be here in Illinois. Most of the past year I've been locked in a little room in Athens, writing a book. For analytical detachment it's great to be an outsider. At a certain point, however, you need to remind yourself who your book is for. So thank you all for coming tonight, and particularly thanks to the Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security Program for inviting me. Thank you Matt Rosenstein, thank you Professor Palmore, thank you Sheila Roberts. My book is called "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower." It's a book about relearning the ancient and honorable art of diplomacy. My message is either uplifting or cynical, depending on your perspective. I argue that to protect America's narrow, selfish national interests in a cost-effective manner, we Americans must learn to behave as if we are a well-informed, law-abiding, and moral superpower. My lecture tonight is about repairing the damage from America's failed intervention in Iraq. I wish I could offer you a magic answer. If I thought one existed, I would not have resigned. I would have stayed on as a diplomat to work for it. But all the options are ugly. We can leave Iraq, and watch a civil war from outside. Or we can stay in Iraq, and take part in a different civil war. The political basis of a united Iraq is almost completely destroyed, but not quite. Partitioning the country would save lives, probably, as it did in Bosnia. But until more people have died, no outsider has the moral and political authority to impose such a solution on the Iraqi people. The U.S. military can prevent any given faction from winning, but it cannot prevent the Iraqi people as a whole from losing. The world is watching Iraq, and they don't like what they see. Foreigners are just as polite as you are. Even if President Bush asks them point-blank, they will not tell him the honest truth about America's current standing in the world. That's why a superpower needs a few stooped and unthreatening diplomats to listen respectfully to foreigners and watch their talk shows. When you do, you discover that, in trashing Iraq, we also trashed much of the world's acceptance that the U.S. had some legitimate right to manage the planet for them. This is bad. I say this not just as a patriotic sentimentalist. I say this as someone who believes that the U.S. government has a duty to protect the security and prosperity of the American people. The world need legitimate leadership. Why? Katrina is a foretaste of the likely future awaiting us. Societies live in a precarious balance with their environment. In most of the world, the delicate equilibrium of the population with the environment is now so fragile that it can be toppled by ordinary climatic variation. America's interests are served when foreign states provide their citizens with sustainable development, education, public health, and democratic values. When states flourish, their citizens buy our DVDs and jet airplanes and send their kids to our universities. When states fail, they export disease, terrorism, and a chain-reaction of environmental destruction. The United States cannot build levees high enough to wall itself off from the consequences of global environmental collapse. America is the largest consumer of the world's wealth. America becomes, inevitably, a consumer of the world's catastrophes. The U.S. government, even with centuries of tradition and public consensus behind it, does not feel it can legitimately ask American voters to pay taxes to sustain the services it provides. It will not impose energy conservation, or sensible land use, or health care. If we Americans have such an unimpressive record, picture the weak, undemocratic governments in the developing world. They are helpless on their own to protect the long-term carrying capacity of their territory from the natural behavior of their citizens. The key to governance, whether local, national, or global, is legitimacy. It's time to define that term as best I can. Legitimacy Three friends and I hiked one August into a Portuguese custom called the Chega de Bois, the showdown of the bulls. The chega de bois is an entertaining way of choosing breeding stock, by having two bulls fight it out for dominance. We followed behind the local champion, in black. He weighed about a ton, and had nasty horns, but he let himself be switched along by a couple of kids with sticks. His out-of-town rival, in red, was waiting in the pasture,. When enough spectators had paid their 5 euros, the black bull was let into the pasture. Primal instinct took over. For the next twenty minutes the two bulls pushed each other back and forth. Black was more experienced. Red was heavier, and determined not to lose. The stalemate began to look dangerous. Black lost his bladder control. Red was panting uncontrollably. The flies were eating them both alive. Ideally, one bull is smart enough to recognize defeat and take to his heels. But bulls are not bred for brains. Sometimes both bulls die on the field, which is a very expensive reminder that strength and aggression are not identical with reproductive fitness. Suddenly an old rancher stepped forward. With a shout and a wave of his stick he told the two bulls the fight was over. With amazing docility, indeed with relief, they headed off in opposite directions to scratch their fly-bites. The other spectators grumbled. I was relieved. There is something besides horns and testicles at work in the world. Even in the grip of their most primal and deadly instincts, bulls will submit to outside control that need be no more lethal than a stick and a shout. Human beings are far more dangerous animals than bulls. They too, however, can be herded easily and gratefully, by a policeman with a stick or a priest with a book or a politician in a dark suit. What I mean by legitimacy is that thing that makes us herdable. Humans have evolved powerful rules of how to behave. Some part of our behavior is genetic, instinctive and universal, some is learned and specific to a tribe or an individual. Whatever the rules are, and however we come to accept them, a working majority of us are conditioned to feel some dim biochemical reward when the rules are clear and we obey them. We feel righteous anger at those who disobey. Bulls learn to obey the person with the stick. Americans learn to stop their cars at stop signs, even when the intersection is empty and no police are near. A stop sign has legitimacy. The President of the United States has enormous legitimacy. When he gives an order, the men and women of the U.S. government will happily move heaven and earth to carry it out. Legitimacy sounds like a value judgment. It isn't. It is a purely practical, empirical attribute of human behavior. Saddam Hussein was legitimate to a large number of Iraqis. So was Hitler to most Germans. Their commands were obeyed willingly and energetically by subordinates, each for some specific set of rational and irrational and instinctive reasons powerful enough to trump morality as a guide to behavior. Legitimacy is local. A stop sign has strong legitimacy in its specific,context of an Illinois road intersection. It means something different hung on the wall of someone's dorm room. In Athens, a stop sign is one factor, like gender, class, and vehicle size, in a permanently renegotiated contest of dominance and submission between rival drivers. Legitimacy is vital for the effective functioning of human or any other societies. Predictably, Greeks have more traffic fatalities per passenger-mile than Americans do. In general, the U.S. is comparatively prosperous and successful because its institutions are seen by the vast majority of the American people as legitimate. Enough of us accept laws and taxes to sustain the social infrastructure that permits a large population to live crowded together. There are lots of sources of legitimacy. Law and religion are obvious ones, but the really powerful and universal ones are the instinctive strategies we share with our fellow social primates. They are the predictable attributes of a successful little group of hunter-gatherers. Group loyalty, conformity, and strict reciprocity are survival strategies that work. Territoriality is also hard-wired into us, as it is into dogs and wolves. Skipping ruthlessly over 100,000 years of human evolution, let me just say that human beings are relentlessly nationalistic. It's a recent phenomenon in its current form, and it may not last. But for the moment we have to deal with it. I learned about nationalism the hard way, as a young diplomat in Athens. Greece is a military ally of the U.S., tied to us by a million Greek-Americans, by shared democratic values, and by mutual self-interest. Greece is also small, 11 million people. The U.S. is large. No reasonable U.S. request should ever be refused. In fact, refusal of American requests is the default position for any Greek politician who wants to remain popular with his voters. Greek political competition is brutal and personal. The key source of legitimacy for politicians in their struggle against their local rivals is their perceived ability to protect the nation and its territory against outsiders. In Greece, the willingness to stand up with irrational persistence to the polite requests of a superpower is taken as proof of fitness to protect the herd. Working patiently with local politicians, America always got anything it really needed, but only after months or years of painful negotiations designed to prove to the Greek public that America's superpower status had nothing to do with the magnanimous Greek decision to do us a favor. Most foreigners are similar to Greeks in refusing to seem to bow to foreign dictation. So for that matter are Americans. A shameful secret: I played Dungeons and Dragons in college. There is a similar fantasy role-playing game popular in Washington, promoted these days by the neoconservatives. In that game, U.S. bureaucrats run the world. We come up with a plan. Congress votes money. The president of the United States waves his stick and shouts, and the fighting bulls return amiably to their respective pens and hold democratic elections. It would be nice if America could exercise on a global scale the authority a Portuguese farmer has over his bulls. Nationalism makes it impossible. When the U.S. President gets caught up in our fantasy and waves his stick, both bulls turn for an instant and look at him hopefully. Perhaps the farmer is going to shoot the annoying intruder in my pasture? No? Then they lower their horns again for another round. I spent twenty years wracking my brains to help come up with ingenious solutions to international conflicts – Israel's with Palestine, Morocco's with Western Sahara, Greece and Cyprus's with Turkey, India's with Pakistan, and Armenia's with Azerbaijan. My intentions were admirable, and so were my bosses'. America genuinely wanted peace, stability, democracy, prosperity, justice, and protection of the environment. And we did some good. Bosnia is an example of stopping the slaughter. But can anyone name an international conflict that has genuinely been solved in the past fifty years? I can think of only one. Why is it so difficult? Politicians everywhere are locked in a legitimacy trap. At some primitive level, disputes with outsiders cannot be resolved without someone surrendering some part of the sacred soil or sovereignty. Doing so destroys the basis for legitimacy as leaders. Those who sue for peace will be toppled by their political rivals, even killed, unless the public accepts that in this case there is some higher legitimacy to which the nation as a whole must bow. In our fantasy world, respect for U.S. military and economic power is a source of U.S. legitimacy for foreigners. So is America's ideology of freedom and democracy. In the real, political world they are not, and never have been. When a shared threat exists, America enjoys the legitimacy that comes with being a comrade in arms. Shared fear of the Russians gave us some ability to dictate policy to our allies. On most issues, we have always been forced to recruit local sources of legitimacy to achieve our goals. Diplomacy is mostly about identifying and using those sources of local legitimacy. Practical Results of Iraq War I was absolutely certain that Iraq would be a disaster when I resigned in February 2003, three weeks before the war started. I had spent 20 years promoting democracy, human rights, and economic reform overseas. The results of our efforts, even in countries where we were welcome guests rather than armed occupiers, were slow, gradual, and too fragile to survive in a country like Iraq. We had no brilliant vision of how to fix an already broken state. More importantly, we did not have the legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis or their neighbors to impose such a vision even if we had one. We could not use the methods Saddam had used, and the Iraqis would quickly realize we would not. We were thus certain to fail. That failure would be a grave blow to America's ability to manage the world in the service of its own interests. I wrote in my letter of resignation that "After the shambles of postwar Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead." Rereading that letter with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had written Gaza rather than Ramallah. Wandering around Ramallah a year ago, I discovered that it's in good shape except for Arafat's bombed-out headquarters. But Iraq is definitely a shambles, not only in the modern meaning of a bloody mess but in the literal meaning of a slaughterhouse. The world watched Iraq dissolve into chaos. That chaos America is essentially powerless to cure. The moral burden we incurred there will haunt us. But there is another cost, to America's fragile legitimacy in the eyes of foreigners as the natural leader of the international community. When the Soviet Union seemed to threaten the survival of states around the world, foreigners instinctively looked to the United States as their leader. Being seen as close to the U.S. was good domestic politics for all kinds of politicians. As long as the threat seemed real, America did not have to seem moral, simply competent and affordable as a source of protection. President Bush the elder and President Clinton recognized that the disappearance of the Soviet threat meant a different basis for the legitimacy of American leadership. None of our close allies, at least in Europe, face any credible military threat to their people. They accept outside dictation only under very limited circumstances. In practice, the U.S. could lead the free world when three conditions were met: when national interests coincided, when the action could be defended as compatible with common sense morality and international law, and when the U.S. contributed a share of the resources more or less proportionate with the control it demanded. The restoration of Kuwait in Desert Storm is the perfect example. The world rallied gratefully around U.S. leadership, under the UN flag, and the results were excellent. European politicians had no problem justifying their subordinate role. Overruling leftist opposition and a crowd of wailing Greek mothers dressed in black, the Greek government sent a frigate to the Persian Gulf. As individuals we surrender some of our sovereignty to the state and the law. States will sometimes surrender a part of their sovereignty to international law and to the pressure of the international institutions they have joined. France and Germany solved their mortal, zero-sum conflict over Alsace-Lorraine by creating the European Union as a non-territorial source of political legitimacy. The U.S. spent much of the 20th century promoting the concept of binding international law. We created the United Nations partly as a selfish instrument for locking in a favorable status quo after WWII, partly as a genuinely idealistic experiment. By surrendering a tiny amount of sovereignty to the UN, we made it legitimate for other countries to do the same. Bush the elder and Clinton both understood the usefulness of transnational institutions as a source of legitimacy for U.S. intervention in the world. When President Bush came to office saw himself first and foremost as leader of the American people. This is normal. But he was incurious about the outside world. He did not give sufficient credit to the brilliance his father had shown in managing the transition away from a world organized by superpower rivalry. He was indifferent to the diplomatic skills President Clinton used to maintain the world's perception that America shared the values and aspirations of ordinary people everywhere. Bush apparently assumed that American power and American values spoke for themselves. He had never attempted to use American power oversees with foreigners. He did not know how ugly and inefficient and expensive the raw use of American power in Iraq would prove. Most of you have doubtless read the results of the global opinion surveys. In most of the countries whose opinions we care about, the U.S. image plummeted after Iraq to the lowest level since we began measuring. I was in Greece, watching my close Greek friends turn their backs on the United States. Their anger at the U.S. slipped over, for the first time in my career, into ordinary personal relationships. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction was a blow to America's credibility. Many foreigners insisted that America had lied knowingly, in a grab for the world's oil resources. Others concluded that American intelligence services are incompetent and thus that the CIA's warnings can safely be ignored. To be believed by foreigners is an incredibly important diplomatic asset. Every American diplomat, from Powell on down, paid a price for defending a falsehood. The photographs from Abu Ghraib are recognized now by almost every schoolchild on the planet. The wave of revulsion against the U.S. was incredibly powerful. The decision to withhold the protections of the Geneva Conventions from prisoners, the violation of the U.S. constitution in holding American citizens indefinitely without charge, and the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, were incredibly damaging. The U.S. relies on the rule of law to bind the behavior of foreign states. By showing that we were not ourselves bound by the rule of law, we signaled the world that there was no moral basis for the U.S. claim to leadership. The world is not a popularity contest. Why does it matter to a superpower if foreign publics got angry and afraid? Unfortunately, it does matter. What we accomplished by blackening America's image was to raise the domestic political cost to politicians of cooperating with us. Politicians are cowards. All other things being equal, they prefer to be guided by their tracking polls. When the U.S. was leader of the free world, politicians would follow us even on debatable judgment calls, like the NATO decision to intervene in Serbia on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians. Now that the U.S. is an unloved superpower, Europe will follow us only when we are absolutely in the right. Moral clarity is rare in daily life, even rarer in foreign policy. When America cannot lead and be followed, people die who might have lived. The world needs strong leadership from time to time. Left purely to their own devices, individual states will cut down their forests, pollute their rivers, let epidemics rage out of control, slaughter their minorities, and finally push a wave of young men across the border, sometimes heavily armed, sometimes simply starving. At the moment, the EU has the economic power to influence normal states, but only the United States has the military and logistical capability to stop a remote civil war in its tracks. No other country, unaided, can field enough troops and supplies for more than a few weeks. No other nation is so entangled in the world that its politicians can persuade ordinary parents to send their sons and daughters into some distant jungle without some clear selfish as well as moral reason to do so. But it must be legitimate leadership. Faced with U.S. military power, the prudent response of any state is to go limp. A state that goes limp, that leaves a legitimacy vacuum, becomes a disaster for its own people and ultimately for the world. Look at Haiti, look at Congo and Liberia, look at Iraq. America is bound by the laws of physics and the laws of human nature. Power in the absence of legitimacy rapidly becomes too expensive for repeated use. The U.S. no longer enjoys the modest legitimacy that came with the title of leader of the free world. President Bush has changed course on many issues since 2004, mostly for the better, but he cannot regain for the U.S. that title or that legitimacy, no matter how brilliant, sensitive, and diplomat he becomes. Perceived character is decisive. A critical mass of foreigners has reached the judgment that his values and aspirations conflict with theirs. The next U.S. president, of whichever political party, can claw back America's lost ground, but it will take years of expensive altruism, or else some unifying catastrophe. In the meantime, if we need international legitimacy for some international intervention, we have no choice but to appeal to international organizations and international law. That of course, is the reason we created the UN, as a source of legitimacy all its member states were bound to accept. When the UN Security Council has spoken unanimously, states can send their sons and daughters into harm's way at no domestic political cost, often under U.S. command. The UN mandate and the blue helmet is an excuse a corrupt and selfish politician can use for not resisting foreign intervention. Everyone knows that the UN is slow, weak, bureaucratic, corrupt, and incredibly frustrating to work with. Everyone agrees that it must be reformed. But successful reform is blocked for many reasons, U.S. domestic politics not least. Simply bullying, as John Bolton tried last month during the 60th anniversary UN reform summit, failed miserably. The goal of Bolton and his fellow conservatives was to maintain maximum U.S. freedom of action in the world to protect our interests. That goal is completely incompatible with the goal of an effective UN. The UN's legitimacy is based on its universality. Every sovereign state is a member, and every sovereign state can tell its people back home that, in the UN at least, it is the equal of the sole superpower. Sovereign equality is a myth, but without that myth the UN does not fulfill its chief function of endowing the intervention of the US and its fellow powers with legitimacy. States are not equal, but a successful superpower will spend time and money to pretend that they are. It's a necessary pretence, without which no foreigner will accept our fitness to run the planet. Multilateral diplomacy thus requires incredible patience. The counterpart to sovereign equality is universal compliance. No leader will bind his country unless he can tell his people that others are similarly bound. Where the U.S. refuses to be bound, there international law has no useful legitimacy. In the end, I believe, the legitimacy gap will only be filled when the U.S. and the other four permanent members accept a dilution of their veto power as part of an expansion of the Security Council. This is a cheap sacrifice. Any American policy that cannot win the endorsement of two of our close allies is a policy doomed to fail in any case. So let me end with a plug for diplomacy as a career. To succeed as a virtuous superpower, America needs energetic, idealistic, insatiably curious diplomats. Diplomacy is an amazing intellectual adventure, offering a challenging life-style and the power to help people -- never quite as much as we hope, but that is true of every profession. Prowess at Risk or Diplomacy or other games of global conquest is not required. We do not live in a zero-sum universe. The rise of nationalism has made an American empire too expensive to be worth having. It doesn't matter how brave or smart or lethal we are. Certain moral notions are hard-wired into human behavior. Aspiring imperialists violate those moral notions by their mere presence. And terrorism has given the weak a powerful political weapon against it. The purpose of U.S. diplomacy is not to conquer or bully foreigners but rather to make it as cheap and easy as possible for them to do what America needs them to. Diplomats understand the power of local nationalism. Correctly channeled through the effective personal relationships diplomats build, nationalism is not something to deplore but rather a mobilizing force for human energy. This past weekend we had one of those events that makes me miss the diplomatic life. After weeks of classic nose-to-nose, give-and-take diplomacy, the kind that seemed impossible at the time I resigned, the U.S. government met the North Korean government half way in a deal that would benefit the whole world. North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for economic assistance and a U.S. pledge of non-aggression and a nuclear-weapons-free Korean peninsula. The deal was a rare triumph for Chinese diplomacy. And like most diplomatic triumphs, it is probably too good to be true. As soon as the deal was announced, carpet-chewers on both sides of the Pacific got to work to denounce the concessions their diplomats had made. Congress is famous for killing agreements, either directly or by betraying the funding promises America makes. It was fortunately distracted by Katrina. But a whole generation of North Korean nuclear and security bureaucrats faces ruin if North Korea's nuclear program is dismantled. They have persuaded at least part of the North Korean government to walk back from what its delegation agreed in Beijing. Helping North Korean moderates in their domestic political battle to keep the deal alive will require brilliant U.S. diplomacy. I know the senior U.S. negotiator, Chris Hill. Secretary of State Rice chose a professional diplomat smart, hard-working, tough, patient, and self-effacing enough to let common sense shine through. Whether the deal holds up or not, seeing the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Asian and Pacific Affairs doggedly pursuing a peaceful deal has done an enormous amount to restore the reputation of U.S. foreign policy in Asia. If his work is the new model for patient, sensible U.S. diplomacy, now is a good moment for new university graduates to reconsider the Foreign Service as a career. I hope some of you will. 11