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Dominators ruleForget hawks and doves. The post--Cold War political struggle is between "dominators" and "conciliators." Right now, thanks especially to Osama bin Laden, those who believe U.S. national security lies in raw military power, not cooperative agreements, are in control.
Dominators believe in leading by example, not by consensus or building coalitions. They are unapologetic about the primacy of U.S. power and the ineffectuality of treaties. Conciliators are protective of treaties by nature. They seek to devalue weapons of mass destruction--by example, by multilateral diplomacy, and by strengthening arms control regimes. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has described the differences between the two groups as those who believe in power pitted against those who believe in paper. [1] Thanks to Osama bin Laden, dominators now rule the roost in Washington. The terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wide latitude to implement their preferred remedies. Notwithstanding the close division on Capitol Hill between Republicans and Democrats, U.S. national security policy is now heavily lopsided toward power projection and away from treaty regimes and preventive diplomacy. The resulting imbalance is not sustainable. By elevating preemption from a military option to a doctrine, the administration has made coalition-building increasingly difficult. And the more the Bush administration wages war, the harder it will become to recruit followers. Power-projection capabilities, combined with the celebration of triumphant American values, constitute far too narrow a base on which to maintain U.S. diplomatic leadership. The hubris reflected in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy invites not just the scorn of diplomatic historians, but also a serious reckoning ahead. Overreaching will eventually generate a corrective balance, which could come at considerable cost. When military options are strengthened at the expense of other instruments of national protection, lives are unnecessarily placed at risk. Battles against proliferators cannot be truly won when treaties embodying disarmament norms are scorned or systematically weakened.
Failing to adapt to changeWithout the surprise attacks carried out by the Al Qaeda network and the demise of the Soviet Union, it would have been inconceivable for a U.S. administration to champion preemption as a military doctrine or to systematically denigrate treaties governing weapons of mass destruction. Yet another important factor has contributed to the empowerment of the dominators: Conciliators have failed to articulate a rationale for their preferences in keeping with new security threats posed by asymmetric warfare and terrorism. The arms control and nonproliferation treaties championed by conciliators were very much a product of the Cold War. Arguments used to protect these treaties during the U.S.-Soviet confrontation--particularly the virtues of national vulnerability to promote strategic and arms race stability--were utterly unconvincing once Moscow could no longer compete with Washington. Conciliators lost their domestic audience when they continued to defend the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, after the Soviet threat subsided, and then disappeared. The visionary appeal of arms control and disarmament accords became lost in Cold War argumentation, such as defending the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty during the 1990s as the "cornerstone of strategic stability." When national anxieties shifted to homeland defense, arms controllers had no message to replace this mantra. Their arguments have allowed dominators to marginalize their opponents as Cold War thinkers when, ironically, it is their own preferences--for national missile defense, space warfare capabilities, and new initiatives to affirm the value of nuclear weapons--that more faithfully reprise Cold War impulses. Conciliators need to find a new strategic concept to replace MAD, to reclaim their audience, to roll back proliferation threats, and to block ill-advised U.S. initiatives. Until they do, treaties will continue to be hollowed out, and the problems posed by weapons of mass destruction will grow. The overdrawn typology of dominators focused on muscular unilateralism and conciliators inclined to treaties and multilateralism is useful for ordering chaos, but the two camps also have much in common. [2] They both support superior U.S. conventional military capabilities, and provide generous funding to the Pentagon for these purposes. Both support improvements in U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities, recognize the value of reducing deployed nuclear forces, and seek the earliest possible deployment of effective theater missile defenses. The two camps also agree that asymmetric threats and proliferation challenges are now paramount. And in the heat of a national election campaign, both camps voted by significant majorities to authorize the Bush administration to wage war against Saddam Hussein. Despite their commonalities, there are profound differences between the two, as is evident from the marked changes in U.S. national security strategy from the Clinton to the Bush administrations. A badly wounded Clinton administration sought to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and update the ABM Treaty. The incoming Bush administration opposed both accords. As William Kristol and Robert Kagan correctly predicted, the Bush team asked Americans "to face this increasingly dangerous world without illusions. . . . American dominance can be sustained for many decades to come, not by arms agreements, but by augmenting America's power, and, therefore, its ability to lead." [3] Krauthammer trumpeted a new "Bush Doctrine," which "holds that, when it comes to designing our nuclear forces, we build to suit. We will build defensive missiles to suit our needs. We will build offensive missiles to suit our needs. . . . For reasons of delicacy, Bush spoke of the need to 'replace' rather than abrogate the treaty, which remains the Linus blanket of an entire generation of arms controllers. No matter. He made it clear that we will blithely ignore it. . . . Sure, to placate the critics we will be consulting and assuaging and schmoozing everyone from Tokyo to Moscow. But in the end, we will build a defense to meet the challenge of the missile era. If others don't like it, too bad." [4]
A new overkill?The Bush administration includes many who see considerable value in extending "full spectrum dominance" from conventional military forces to nuclear weapons, national missile defenses, and space. They value nuclear weapons highly; consequently, they are very uncomfortable with an extended moratorium on nuclear testing. Some dominators are attracted to a new nuclear weapon design that could be employed against underground bunkers housing evil leaders or hidden caches of deadly weapons. They find reductions from bloated Cold War levels acceptable as long as they do not conflict with targeting requirements, and as long as the United States maintains a large, ready reserve of nuclear warheads that could be deployed when needed. True dominators view the weaponization of space as a force multiplier. They expect other states not to abide by negotiated restraints or "rules of the road" against space warfare, and thus prefer to compete to win in this realm. As the Rumsfeld Commission concluded in January 2001, "We know from history that every medium--air, land, and sea--has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different." The commission called for "superior space capabilities," including the ability to "negate the hostile use of space against U.S. interests." A robust deterrence strategy for space would require "power projection in, from, and through space." Moreover, senior political and military leadership "needs to test these capabilities in exercises on a regular basis." [5] These impulses were faithfully reflected in subsequent decisions by the Bush administration. In December 2001, Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, as well as unilateral reductions in deployed U.S. warheads. But the numbers of launchers for those warheads, which could be uploaded as needed, would not be reduced. The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), submitted to Congress in December 2001 and leaked to the press in January 2002, pointed toward reductions over a 10-year period to between 1,700 to 2,200 operationally deployed warheads on strategic forces, with another 3,000-warhead reserve that could be deployed in days, weeks, or months. Thousands of additional warheads or key components were placed in an "inactive reserve." [6] Moreover, the NPR added conventional strike capabilities to U.S. nuclear war plans, a long-standing worry for Moscow and Beijing, while calling for upgrades in communication and intelligence for real-time targeting. On top of this, the United States would overlay "limited" but ill-defined and open-ended national missile defenses. These contingency plans and numbers were subsequently reaffirmed in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty signed in Moscow in May 2002. The Moscow treaty provides for maximum U.S. flexibility with minimal oversight. Indeed, the administration's desire for flexibility was so great that the obligations assumed under this accord will be in effect only at the end of a single day--after which all obligations will cease. Moreover, the accord's monitoring provisions will lapse three years prior to this briefest of obligations. Hard-headed, narrow conceptions of U.S. national security interests championed by the Bush presidential campaign were jettisoned after 9/11. The Bush administration reacted to Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with a potent fusion of moral indignation, Wilsonian idealism, and global ambition. Nowhere is this geopolitical moralism more evident than in the administration's National Security Strategy posture statement, released in September 2002, which declared that the U.S. example of freedom, democracy, and free enterprise constituted "a single, sustainable model for international success," and that this model was "right and true for every person, in every society." Among the National Security Strategy's many pledges, President Bush promised to "defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants"; "to extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent"; "to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world"; and "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." This wide-ranging agenda invited subsequent charges of hypocrisy or the hyper-extension of American exceptionalism. A single sentence in this 31-page document was devoted to "enhancing" arms control efforts. [7] This procession of events and public announcements was met with muted commentary by conciliators on Capitol Hill struggling to find their voices in a war against terrorism that quickly evolved into a broader effort against the "axis of evil" identified in Bush's first State of the Union message as consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. These evil-doers were, by definition, immune from the subtleties of diplomacy or treaty constraints. The remaining option--the use of American firepower, perhaps preemptively--was drummed up for Iraq, but not for North Korea. The evangelical theme of good v. evil, transposed to international relations, reinforced caricatures of the administration's penchant for military options and disrespect for treaties, while masking a harsh and uncontested truth: If Iraq, Iran, or North Korea were to succeed in their ambitions to become nuclear weapon states, along with their continued acquisition of chemical and biological weapons, nonproliferation regimes would become hollow shells. Conciliators found themselves in a bind, seeking to shore up treaties but wary of giving the Bush administration a blank check for military action.
Needed: A new synthesisConciliators need the help of dominators to strengthen treaties, but dominators are intent on meting out justice, not on treaty-strengthening measures. The game plan favored by dominators is a sure-fire recipe for the militarization of U.S. nonproliferation policy. States fearing U.S. power projection capabilities will continue to seek deterrence through their own mass-casualty weapons and novel means to deliver them. Thus, rather than having a cautionary effect, even the successful use of force could breed additional cases of proliferation--unless military success is accompanied by the treaty-strengthening measures conciliators seek. The net effect of successful coercion accompanied by scorn for arms control and nonproliferation treaties would further weaken treaty regimes, setting the stage for more proliferation and more unilateral enforcement--unless the enforcer chooses isolationism instead. A successful, long-term strategy of containing and rolling back proliferation therefore requires the leverage provided by dominators and the tools favored by conciliators. Dominators need the preferred instruments of conciliators as much as treaty supporters need the muscle that dominators would prefer to apply. When the United States seeks but fails to strengthen treaty norms because of the recalcitrance of other state parties, or when strengthening measures fail to alter the behavior of miscreants, then military action is not only justified, it could be essential to promote public safety and to maintain the integrity of treaty regimes. Indeed, the expressed readiness to act militarily in hard cases such as Iraq might provide impetus to uphold treaty norms. Conversely, when the United States refuses to ratify treaties, fails to pay its dues for treaty implementation, and rejects strengthening measures proposed by others without offering better alternatives, treaty regimes will be weakened--even if military action is successful. The glaring weakness of the Bush administration's counterproliferation strategy is the severe imbalance it reflects between defense and diplomacy. The tilt away from treaties and diplomacy is evident in the administration's budget priorities. In the fiscal 2003 budget request, missile defense programs received more funding than the entire State Department. The administration spends one dollar on missile defenses for every quarter spent on programs to safeguard dangerous weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union. Almost five times as much is spent on programs to maintain the U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads and prepare for a resumption of nuclear tests than on initiatives to control "loose nukes" and fissile material. These grave imbalances reflect the preferences of dominators skeptical of treaties and confident in the efficacy of muscling states of proliferation concern. If dominators seek to fill the void created by nullifying the ABM Treaty and rejecting MAD with missile defenses and preemptive strikes, domestic divisions will surely grow and ties with allies will fray. Conciliators have yet to conceptualize and articulate an agenda to fill this void. The old foundations of strategic arms control, necessarily erected upon the acceptance of national vulnerability during the Cold War, have been washed away by the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of asymmetric warfare. The cornerstone of the earlier construction, the ABM Treaty, lies in ruin. Those who believe in strategic arms control and reducing proliferation dangers are now obliged to rethink their craft. New construction is required, erected upon a broad domestic political base that appeals to allies and major powers. The design of this new construction needs to be muscular, yet tactful. Its central purpose, the strengthening of nonproliferation treaty regimes, must be underwritten by all major powers. What constitutes an intellectually and politically compelling strategic concept for anxious times? What is a practical, effective alternative to domination? The answer does not lie in conciliation--conciliation is a tactic, not a strategic concept. How, then, do we update the practice of arms control to address evolving threats of terrorism, asymmetric warfare, and proliferation? Conceptualization usually occurs in academia or in think tanks, after which it is embraced by an administration that invites conceptualizers in. Thus, the Kennedy and Nixon administrations enlisted the brainpower of those who charted the new territory of strategic arms control before making their way to Washington. The Reagan administration enlisted the harshest critics of strategic arms control, with treaty opponents eventually giving way to the architects of a new enterprise of deep cuts. Similarly, the administration of President George W. Bush borrowed heavily from those who spent the Clinton years thinking hard about how nuclear strategy might be altered to conform to a new era of U.S. strategic superiority. Dominators did their homework; their preferences, missile defense and the control of space, were ready to be translated into policy once Bush took office, alongside their plans for treaty extrication. [8] In contrast, conciliators have been tardy in doing their conceptual homework. Little work was done within the Clinton administration, when treaty implementation and tactical concerns dominated the nuclear agenda. By the time Bush took office, there was only one strongly articulated agenda for the nuclear future. This agenda is seriously imbalanced, and unless significantly altered, will not provide for nuclear safety.
Cooperative threat reductionA new strategic concept is in plain view, having been born of necessity to safeguard the dangerous weapons and materials residing in the former Soviet Union. This strategic concept is known as cooperative threat reduction. Initially championed on Capitol Hill by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, these programs were soon affixed with the acronym CTR, which begat additional acronyms as new initiatives were spun off to address the multiple problems attendant to the Soviet Union's demise. CTR programs retain consensual support because they have proved their worth in readily understood ways. CTR programs in the former Soviet Union have secured the deactivation of more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and many hundreds of launchers for intercontinental nuclear attack. Further assistance has been provided for the storage and transportation of nuclear weapons. Construction has proceeded on a large, secure, fissile material storage facility. The United States has helped to improve the safety and security at Russian chemical weapons storage sites. Security upgrades have been implemented for hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Radiation detection equipment has been installed at Russian border crossings to help detect and interdict nuclear smuggling. Plutonium-laden fuel rods from nuclear power reactors have been secured. Cooperative threat reduction initiatives grew as the intellectual and political capital behind strategic arms control was shrinking. The Clinton administration added dramatically to this shift in capital flows by building considerably on Nunn-Lugar initiatives while proceeding tentatively on the strategic arms control accords inherited from the administration of George H. W. Bush. Quietly, without much fanfare and below the horizon of partisan debate, the daily practice of cooperative threat reduction became the primary means of reducing the dangers associated with weapons of mass destruction. While bilateral treaties were tied up in the politics of ratification, legislative conditions, and domestic division, cooperative threat reduction initiatives expanded. CTR initiatives grew in importance as bilateral and multilateral treaty talks lost traction. The time is ripe to elevate the varied practices of cooperative threat reduction to a central organizing principle for dealing with the combined dangers associated with proliferation, terrorism, and asymmetric warfare. Cooperative threat reduction programs provide the positive construct needed to meet the top-most security challenge facing the United States--keeping dangerous weapons and materials out of the hands of those ready to use them. The shift from a MAD-based structure of strategic arms control to one based on cooperative threat reduction is already well under way. The need for this transition, and the obstacles to achieving it, have become more apparent after the tragic events of 9/11. No one can doubt the desire of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to obtain weapons of mass destruction, nor their will to use them. The concept of cooperative threat reduction is, therefore, far too important and useful to be confined to the former Soviet Union. Instead, CTR-related activities can and should be employed in other troubled regions, wherever dangerous weapons and materials are being held by states that are willing to forgo them in return for economic or security assistance. The practical application of cooperative threat reduction to contain, reduce, and eliminate dangerous weapons and materials should extend as far as political adroitness and financial backing will allow. Cooperative threat reduction is a full-service concept, covering the entire spectrum of post--Cold War dangers ranging from the control of dangerous materials at the source to the dismantlement of deployed strategic weapon systems. CTR programs provide direct and effective linkages between strategic arms control and nonproliferation accords. During the Cold War, CTR programs were an adjunct to treaties; now treaties have taken a back seat to the necessity for cooperative threat reduction. The two work best in concert: CTR initiatives are easiest to implement when backed up by treaty-based obligations for transparency and arms reduction. A cavalier approach to treaties makes CTR initiatives more essential, but also more difficult to implement. Successful cooperative threat reduction requires the progressive diminishment of the salience given to weapons of mass destruction. The low-profile maintenance of the U.S. nuclear deterrent facilitates CTR; in contrast, the design of new nuclear weapons and the resumption of underground tests will produce quite different and pernicious effects. Likewise, successful cooperative threat reduction requires collaboration with Russia and China. The development of rules of the road to prevent the weaponization of space is likely to expand the scope of CTR; conversely, the impulse to deploy anti-satellite weapons on earth or weapons in space will curtail the scope of Russian and Chinese cooperation. The effectiveness of CTR activities will depend on many factors, not the least of which is the degree of comfort major powers have with each other's strategic objectives. In this context, reassurance and transparency matter even more than deterrence. The value of bilateral accords, negotiated with heroic effort over many decades of Cold War strife, rests now, in vastly altered circumstances, primarily in the reassurance they provide to the weaker party, whose cooperation is needed for CTR to expand and deepen. Deep reductions, codified in treaty form, thus facilitate cooperative threat reduction. As reductions proceed, transparency measures and comprehensive cradle-to-grave controls over fissile material become more essential. At least in the near term, these arrangements are more likely to be realized through CTR techniques and voluntary associations than through new treaty obligations. Over time, a broad web of CTR initiatives could become intertwined with treaty regimes, if states are willing to translate higher standards into treaty obligations. The Bush administration cannot build a new international order reflecting American primacy and values while the hollowing out of treaties proceeds apace. Dominators will defeat themselves by negating the preferred tools of conciliators. Conciliators defeat themselves by failing to conceptualize and articulate an alternative strategic concept. Safe passage through dangerous times requires blocking the excesses of dominators as well as new thinking from conciliators.
1. Charles Krauthammer, "The Clinton Paper Chase," Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2002. 2. Charles William Maynes has suggested a more nuanced typology consisting of "controllers," "shapers," and "abstainers." "Contending Schools," National Interest 63 (Spring 2001), pp. 49--58. 3. "Reject the Global Buddy System," New York Times, Oct. 25, 1999. 4. "The Bush Doctrine," Washington Post, May 4, 2001. 5. Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security, Space Management and Organization (Washington, D.C.: Commission to Assess United States National Security Space, January 11, 2001), pp. 9, 16. 6. For more on the Nuclear Posture Review, see J. D. Crouch, "Special Briefing," (Pentagon, January 9, 2002) (www.defenselink .mil/news/Jan2002/t01092002_t0109npr.html). Also see Natural Resources Defense Council, "Faking Nuclear Restraint: The Bush Administration's Secret Plan For Strengthening U.S. Nuclear Forces" (www.nrdc.org/media/press releases/020213a.asp). 7. National Security Strategy of the United States (September 2002) (www.whitehouse .gov/nsc/nss.pdf). 8. The two most important studies in this regard were Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security, Space Management and Organization; and National Institute for Public Policy, Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, Volume I, Executive Report (Fairfax, Va.: NIPP, January 2001).
Michael Krepon, founding president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, is the author of Cooperative Threat Reduction, Missile Defense, and the Nuclear Future (2003), from which this essay is adapted. January/February 2003 pp. 55-60 (vol. 59, no. 01) © 2003 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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he Cold War battles between hawks and doves are history. The new fault line in U.S. national security strategy is between "dominators" and "conciliators." Both groups can be easily caricatured. 
