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Autumn 2005 (Vol. 1, No. 1)


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CONTENTS
THE AMERICAN INTEREST • VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 (AUTUMN 2005)

5 Defining The American Interest

7 Symposium: The Sources of American Conduct


A panoramic analysis of Bush Administration policies. Short articles
by Francis Fukuyama, Josef Joffe, Anne Applebaum, Eliot Cohen,
Glenn Loury, James Q. Wilson, Peter Berger, Ruth Wedgwood
and Walter Russell Mead are anchored by a spirited critique of the
Administration’s perception of the historical moment:

37 The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign

47 by Zbigniew Brzezinski

47 A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice


The Secretary of State gets beneath the headlines to address the theory
and practice of American statecraft.

Essays

58 Asia’s Destiny, America’s Choice


by Kishore Mahbubani
Despite an enormous reservoir of goodwill for the United States in
Asia, the Pacific Ocean seems to grow wider every day. Here’s a diag-
58 nosis of the problem, and a plea for urgent care.

68 Warrior Honor
by Robert D. Kaplan
The American soldier fights for freedom, and for God. An “embed-
ded” view of the code of personal conduct that motivates America’s
warriors.

74 “I Will Be Your Poet”: Walt Whitman’s America


by David Kirby
Leaves of Grass is 150 years old, but vibrant as ever. A fellow poet cele-
brates Walt Whitman as America’s muse to the Kosmos, and the

68 craftsman of America’s own spirit.

80 Suffer the Intellectuals


by Owen Harries
Western intellectuals are endlessly engaging and edifying. But when it
comes to capturing the trends that define present reality and gauging
the shape of the future, they are uncannily wrong.

2 The American Interest


85 Global Warming Goes to Market
by Senator Joseph Lieberman
Global warming is real, and the dangers it raises are serious. Luckily,
an affordable, market-based solution is at hand.

Toolbox

92 U.S. Port Security and the Global War on Terror


by Stephen Flynn

74 Seven specific suggestions for immediate Executive action.

Reviews

97 The Gloryland Chorus


by Clifford Orwin
Robert Wuthnow worries that America’s traditional “live and let live”
approach to religious diversity isn’t good enough. He seeks a more
engaged pluralism, but his own analysis suggests he’s not likely to get it.

101 Reading 9/11

113 by Mary Habeck


A guide to the hundreds of books that have been written in the past
four years about Islamist terrorism and the 9/11 attacks.

109 Tinseltown’s Tin Ear


by Michael Medved
Hollywood is having box office troubles; a review of some recent and
prospective films shows why.

113 Retroview: Family Guys


by David Landes
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has
turned one hundred years old. An eminent economic historian pro-
vides a slice-of-life illustration of Weber’s wisdom.

Notes & Letters

117 Letters from James Hoge, Jr., Moisés Naím, Richard John Neuhaus,
James Kurth, Tod Lindberg, David Goodhart, Steven Lagerfeld and
Colin Powell

119 An Autumn Note: The Wrong Stuff


by Adam Garfinkle
The major intelligence error that presaged the Iraq war and the many
errors that followed raise questions about the capacity of the United
States to manage complex interventions. They cast a shadow forward
on U.S. Middle East policy, as well.

Autumn 2005 3
DEFINING
THE AMERICAN INTEREST

The American Interest (AI) is a new and independent voice devoted to the broad theme of “America in the world.”
Our agenda is threefold. The first is to analyze America’s conduct on the global stage and the forces that shape
it—not just its strategic aspects, but also its economic, cultural and historical dimensions. American statecraft is
not simply about power but also purpose. What is important to the world about America is therefore not just its
politics, but the society from which those politics arise—including America’s literature, music and art, as well as
its values, public beliefs and its historical imagination.

The AI ’s second aim is to examine what American policy should be. It is our view that the challenges and
opportunities of our time transcend the assumptions and vocabulary used by both the Left and Right in recent
years, and that we need to move beyond the defense of obsolete positions. We therefore seek to invite the best
minds from a variety of professions to engage in lively and open-ended debate founded on serious, sustained
arguments and evidence. We wish to provoke and enlighten, not to plead or to please the guardians of any ide-
ology. We take a pragmatic attitude toward policy problems, privileging creativity and effectiveness over con-
tending orthodoxies.

Third, though its name is The American Interest, our pages are open to the world. The simple and inescapable
defining fact of our era is that America is the foremost actor on the world stage. For good or ill, the United States
affects the lives of billions because of its dominance in military, economic and, ever more so, cultural affairs.
Hence, the AI invites citizens of all nations into the American national dialogue, convinced that Americans have
much to learn from the experience and perspectives of others.

There is of course no single or simple “American interest.” The United States is what novelist Tom Wolfe once
labeled our “wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country”; it is a complex society that not just
foreigners but Americans themselves often do not well understand.

Therefore, The American Interest will not represent any single point of view. The names listed on our editorial
board and global advisory council form an eclectic group, though not infinitely so. As the pages below attest, we
share many first principles, but we often disagree energetically on their application. Both through what we share
and what we contest, we mean to enliven and to enlighten the public debate.

We therefore invite adepts of all political schools and persuasions, and those too busy thinking to concern them-
selves with labels, to join the fray. In our five annual issues we want to provide the premier forum for serious and
civil discussion on the full spectrum of issues—domestic and international—that shape America’s role on the
world stage. We seek a discourse characterized by mutual respect, humility and a passion for useful truths. Please
join us.
—Francis Fukuyama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen & Josef Joffe

THE AMERICAN INTEREST 5


toolbox

United States Department of Debate

Washington, D.C. 20500

ACTION MEMORANDUM September 6, 2005

TO: President George W. Bush

FROM: Stephen Flynn

SUBJECT: U.S. Port Security and the GWOT

We have a serious national security vulnerability within the broad


framework of the Global War on Terror. This memorandum outlines
that vulnerability succinctly, and proposes seven specific steps
you can take immediately to remedy it.

* * *

The harbor shared by Los Angeles and its neighbor Long Beach is
arguably America’s most important seaport. Its marine terminals
handle more than 40 percent of all the ocean-borne containers
shipped to the United States. Its refineries receive daily crude
oil shipments and produce one-quarter of the gasoline, diesel and
other petroleum products that are consumed west of the Rocky
Mountains. It is a major port of call for the $25 billion ocean
cruise industry. Just three bridges handle all the truck and train
traffic to and from Terminal Island, where most of the port facil-
ities are concentrated. In short, it is a tempting target for any
adversary intent on bringing its battle to the U.S. homeland.

Yet no one in the Pentagon sees it as his job to protect Los Angeles
and the nation’s other busiest commercial seaports from terrorist
attacks. Oakland, Seattle, Newark, Charleston, Miami, Houston and New
Orleans are America’s economic lifelines to the world, but the U.S.

STEPHEN FLYNN is a retired U.S. Coast Guard officer and a senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations.

92 The American Interest


Department of Defense does not view them as national security prior-
ities. These ports do not deploy the navy ships, troops, munitions
and supplies needed for overseas combat operations. Lacking such
“defense critical infrastructure”, DoD has decided that the respon-
sibility for safeguarding them is not its job.

It is the Department of Homeland Security that should be assuring


that there is credible security along America’s long-neglected
waterfront. But the new Department lacks both the resources and the
White House mandate to undertake this critical mission. This is
because the Office of Management and Budget sees port security as
primarily the responsibility of state and local governments and the
private companies that operate marine facilities. The 2002 National
Homeland Security Strategy sets forth principles to guide federal
outlays for homeland security, maintaining that all levels of gov-
ernment must “work cooperatively to shoulder the cost of homeland
security.” It also hands much of the tab for protecting critical
infrastructure to the private sector. “The [federal] government
should only address those activities that the market does not ade-
quately provide—for example, national defense or border security.
. . . For other aspects of homeland security, sufficient incentives
exist in the private market to supply protection.”

So when it comes to port security, the buck stops somewhere outside


Washington, DC. Since seaports in the United States are locally run
operations where port authorities typically play the role of land-
lord, issuing long-term leases to private companies, it falls large-
ly to those companies to provide for the security of the property
they lease.

In the case of Los Angeles, this translates to the security for


7,500 acres of facilities that run along 49 miles of waterfront
being provided for by minimum-wage private security guards and a
tiny port police force of under 100 officers. The situation in
Long Beach is even worse, with only 12 full-time police officers
assigned to its 3,000 acres of facilities and a small cadre of
private guards provided by the port authority and its tenants. The
command and control equipment to support a new joint operations
center for the few local, state and federal law enforcement
authorities that are assigned to the port will not be in place
until 2008. In the four years since September 11, 2001, the two
cities have received only $40 million in federal grants to improve
the port’s physical security measures. That amount is equivalent

–2–

Autumn 2005 93
to what American taxpayers spend every day on domestic airport
security, or every few hours on military operations and recon-
struction in Iraq.

But the fallout from a terrorist attack on any one of the nation’s
major commercial seaports would hardly be a local matter. For
instance, should al-Qaeda or one of its imitator organizations
succeed in sinking a large ship in the Long Beach channel, auto-
dependent southern California will literally run out of gas with-
in two weeks. This is because U.S petroleum refineries are oper-
ating at full throttle and their products are consumed almost as
quickly as they are made. If crude oil shipments stop, so do the
refineries.

The nation’s manufacturing and retailing sectors depend on “just-


in-time” logistics. Their warehouses are the millions of 40-foot
cargo containers that move around the planet on trucks, trains
and ships. If that circulation is disrupted, assembly plants go
idle and store shelves go bare almost immediately. When a labor-
management dispute led to a 10-day lock out of longshoremen on the
West Coast in October 2002, U.S. businesses quickly racked up bil-
lions of dollars in losses.

In light of these realities, U.S. Navy deployments are not in bal-


ance. While the Navy owns all the federal government’s marine sal-
vage capabilities, it has no salvage ship stationed on the West
Coast—the nearest is located in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. If the
threat to shipping came from some relatively low-tech underwater
mines, as happened in the Red Sea in 1984 and in the Persian Gulf
in 1990, it would take the Navy up to 30 days to get one of its
few minesweepers to the Pacific Coast. They would have to sail
from their homeport of Corpus Christi and steam through the Panama
Canal to complete the voyage.

The limited exceptions to the general lack of port security rule are
San Diego and Norfolk, which are homeports for much of the Navy’s
fleet. There the Defense Department has financed substantial secu-
rity upgrades, including underwater detection of swimmers, a state-
of-the-art closed circuit TV system, and a joint operations center.

This is crazy. We should have learned from the 9/11 attacks and the
more recent July 2005 bombings of the London Underground that we
cannot count on forever keeping the threat of catastrophic terror-
–3–

94 The American Interest


ism at arm’s length. There are limits to what our military opera-
tions in Iraq and Afghanistan can achieve, and our current intelli-
gence capabilities are not yet up to snuff when it comes to this
new adversary. It is reckless to rely on a strategy that depends so
much on “taking the battle to the enemy.”

When it comes to protecting the critical infrastructure concen-


trated in our seaports, the firewall that the national security
establishment has so diligently erected and preserved needs to be
torn down. There are seven things that must be done right away.

• First, over the next 18 months, the Department of Defense must


work closely with the U.S. Coast Guard, now part of the Department
of Homeland Security, and with local authorities in organizing and
participating in exercises that involve simulated attacks on the
nation’s largest commercial seaports. The aim of this training
should not be to prevent every terrorist act; that is unrealistic.
Instead, training should focus on identifying what is required to
quickly restore the operations of the port in the aftermath of a
successful attack. These exercises and planning efforts must be a
joint DoD-DHS effort. The reality is that DHS responsibility is
not yet matched by an adequate resource base, and only DoD has the
physical assets needed to address this vulnerability.

• Second, DoD needs to take the lead on funding and setting up


joint operations centers in all of our major ports: to outfit
them with advanced information and communications technology that
supports surveillance and data sharing; and to provide the nec-
essary training to the local, state and federal agency partici-
pants. The resources and skill sets to accomplish this are con-
centrated within the national security community. It would be too
costly and time consuming to try to develop these capabilities
without the support of the military. This should be completed by
2007.

• Third, as Commander-in-Chief, you can order the Navy to reposition


one of its two salvage ships in Norfolk to the West Coast and take
the lead in drawing up commercial salvage contracts to support domes-
tic harbor clearance. Over the next five years, the Navy should dou-
ble its salvage fleet from four vessels to eight, and base two of
them on the West Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, and two on the East
Coast. The remaining two can be deployed overseas to support Navy
operations.

–4–

Autumn 2005 95
• Fourth, the Navy needs to construct and deploy two new minesweep-
ers to the West Coast. In the interim, the existing fleet should be
used to complete bottom surveys of all the major U.S. commercial
seaports. This baseline information is indispensable in quickly
spotting mines should an adversary deploy them. Without it, the cen-
turies of junk at the bottom of most harbors has to be examined by
divers to determine if it poses a risk. This examination could take
many weeks or even months, and that is unacceptable.

• Fifth, you must double to $1.5 billion annual funding for the Coast
Guard so that it can replace its ancient fleet of vessels and air-
craft, and bring its command and control capabilities into the 21st
century. Many of its cutters, helicopters and planes are operating
long beyond their anticipated service life and routinely experience
major casualties. Under the current delivery schedule, it will be 25
years before the Coast Guard has the kind of assets it needs today
to perform its mission. This, too, is unacceptable.

• Sixth, you must persuade Congress to authorize the realloca-


tion of all the duties and fees that are collected in seaports
to go back into those ports to support security upgrades and
infrastructure improvements. Currently, ports are the only
transportation sector where the federal government is parasitic.
That is, unlike airports and highways, the federal treasury takes
more money away than it returns. According to the Coast Guard,
seaports need to invest upwards of $5 billion to put in place
minimal access control and physical security measures. Neither
the ports nor the municipalities nor the states in which these
ports are located have those kinds of resources.

• Finally, you should order the Executive Branch of the U.S. gov-
ernment to develop a national port plan that takes into account
long-term trade and security trends. Relying on a patchwork quilt
of locally-based decisions for managing this critical infra-
structure is just not acceptable.

As our dependence on global trade grows and the catastrophic ter-


rorist threat persists, we must acknowledge that our commercial
seaports are critical national security assets. As such, we must
work to ensure that they possess adequate capacity, redundancy and
resiliency to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

CC: OVP, NSA, SECDEF, SECSTATE, SECDHS, DCI.

–5–

96 The American Interest

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