CCD Board Member Co-Authors Princeton's National Security Strategy Study Centered on “Concert of Democracies”
October 3, 2006

CCD Board Vice President John Ikenberry is the co-author of the Princeton Project on National Security, a two and a half year project designed to present a bipartisan national security strategy for the United States.  Professor Ikenberry and co-author Anne-Marie Slaughter argue for widespread change throughout American foreign policy.  They believe that the United States needs to shift away from “fighting a global war against Islamofascism”, and instead direct our efforts towards building a “Concert of Democracies”, reform existing international organizations, and build “a new global order that makes America safe and also proud of itself.” 

The Princeton Project on National Security can be viewed in its entirety here.  The Executive Summary of the report can be viewed at the bottom of this text.  John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter present their case in the International Herald Tribune, and Newsweek: International Edition. 

The International Herald Tribune article by the authors argues that the U.N. Security Council needs to be drastically reformed, adding “stable liberal democracies” such as Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and South Africa.  They also believe that the veto power of permanent Security Council members should be revoked when a resolution is “authorizing direct action in response to a crisis.”  A “Concert of Democracies” open to states willing to abide by its democratic principles would apply pressure to the UN to reform, or ultimately replace the world body if it fails to restructure to modern society.
 
In the Newsweek article Ikenberry and Slaughter present a more encompassing view of the project, stating the United States should “renew its ‘grand bargain’ with the rest of the world.”  Here they believe the United States should take the lead in building a stable world order consisting of “open markets, democracy, alliance pacts, and cooperative institutions” that would bind American nation security with global security.

Below is the “Executive Summary” from The Princeton Project on National Security: Forging a World of Liberty Under Law, an excerpt from the original publication.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In the first decade of the 21st century the United States must assess the world not through the eyes of World War II, or the Cold War, or even 9/11. Instead, Americans need to recognize that ours is a world lacking a single organizing principle for foreign policy like anti-fascism or anti-communism. We face many present dangers, several long-term challenges, and countless opportunities. This report outlines a new national security strategy tailored both to the world we inhabit and the world we want to create.

Objectives: The basic objective of U.S. strategy must be to protect the American people and the American way of life. This overarching goal should comprise three more specific aims: 1) a secure homeland, including protection against attacks on our people and infrastructure and against fatal epidemics; 2) a healthy global economy, which is essential for our own prosperity and security; and 3) a benign international environment, grounded in security cooperation among nations and the spread of liberal democracy.

Criteria: To achieve these goals in the 21st century, American strategy must meet six basic criteria. It needs to be: 1) multidimensional, operating like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment’s notice; 2) integrated, fusing hard power – the power to coerce – and soft power – the power to attract; 3) interest-based rather than threat-based, building frameworks of cooperation centered on common interests with other nations rather than insisting that they accept our prioritization of common threats; 4) grounded in hope rather than fear, offering a positive vision of the world and using our power to advance that vision in cooperation with other nations; 5) pursued inside-out, strengthening the domestic capacity, integrity, and accountability of other governments as a foundation of international order and capacity; and 6) adapted to the information age, enabling us to be fast and flexible in a world where information moves instantly, actors respond to it instantly, and specialized small units come together for only a limited time for a defined purpose – whether to make a deal, restructure a company, or plan and execute a terrorist attack.

Forging A World Of Liberty Under Law

America must stand for, seek, and secure a world of liberty under law. Our founders knew that the success of the American experiment rested on the combined blessings of order and liberty, and by order they meant law. Internationally, Americans would be safer, richer, and healthier in a world of countries that have achieved this balance – mature liberal democracies. Getting there requires:

Bringing Governments up to PAR : Democracy is the best instrument that humans have devised for ensuring individual liberty over the long term, but only when it exists within a framework of order established by law. We must develop a much more sophisticated strategy of creating the deeper preconditions for successful liberal democracy – preconditions that extend far beyond the simple holding of elections. The United States should assist and encourage Popular, Accountable, and Rightsregarding (PAR) governments worldwide.

To help bring governments up to PAR, we must connect them and their citizens in as many ways as possible to governments and societies that are already at PAR and provide them with incentives and support to follow suit. We should establish and institutionalize networks of national, regional, and local government officials and nongovernmental representatives to create numerous channels for PAR nations and others to work on common problems and to communicate and inculcate the values and practices that safeguard liberty under law

Building a Liberal Order: The system of international institutions that the United States and its allies built after World War II and steadily expanded over the course of the Cold War is broken. Every major institution – the United Nations (U.N.), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – and countless smaller ones face calls for major reform. The United States has the largest stake of any nation in fixing this system, precisely because we are the most powerful nation in the world. Power cannot be wielded unilaterally, and in the pursuit of a narrowly drawn definition of the national interest, because such actions breed growing resentment, fear, and resistance. We need to reassure other nations about our global role and win their support to tackle common problems.

However, it is clear that America can no longer rely on the legacy institutions of the Cold War; radical surgery is required. The United Nations is simultaneously in crisis and in demand. Its structures are outdated and its performance is inadequate, yet it remains the world’s principal forum for addressing the most difficult international security issues. America must make sweeping U.N. reform a political priority. Necessary reforms include: expanding the Security Council to include India, Japan, Brazil, Germany, and two African states as permanent members without a veto; ending the veto for all Security Council resolutions authorizing direct action in response to a crisis; and requiring all U.N. members to accept “the responsibility to protect,” which acknowledges that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from “avoidable catastrophe,” but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the international community.

While pushing for reform of the United Nations and other major global institutions, the United States should work with its friends and allies to develop a global “Concert of Democracies” – a new institution designed to strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies. This Concert would institutionalize and ratify the “democratic peace.” If the United Nations cannot be reformed, the Concert would provide an alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action, including the use of force, by a supermajority vote. Its membership would be selective, but self-selected. Members would have to pledge not to use or plan to use force against one another; commit to holding multiparty, free-and-fair elections at regular intervals; guarantee civil and political rights for their citizens enforceable by an independent judiciary; and accept the responsibility to protect.

The United States must also: revive the NATO alliance by updating its grand bargains and expanding its international partnerships; build a “networked order” of informal institutions, such as private networks and bilateral ties; and reduce the sharply escalating and politically destabilizing inequalities among and within states that result from the generally beneficial process of globalization.

Rethinking the Role of Force: At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force. Instead of insisting on a doctrine of primacy, the United States should aim to sustain the military predominance of liberal democracies and encourage the development of military capabilities by like-minded democracies in a way that is consistent with their security interests. The predominance of liberal democracies is necessary to prevent a return to destabilizing and dangerous great power security competition; it would also augment our capacity to meet the various threats and challenges that confront us.

America must dust off and update doctrines of deterrence. The United States should announce – preferably with our allies – that in the case of an act of nuclear terrorism, we will hold the source of the nuclear materials or weapon responsible. We must also ensure that our deterrent remains credible against countries with different strategic cultures and varied military national security doctrines. And we must find ways of deterring suppliers of nuclear weapons materials from transferring them – deliberately or inadvertently – to terrorists.

America should develop new guidelines on the preventive use of force against terrorists and extreme states. Preventive strikes represent a necessary tool in fighting terror networks, but they should be proportionate and based on intelligence that adheres to strict standards. The preventive use of force against states should be very rare, employed only as a last resort and authorized by a multilateral institution – preferably a reformed Security Council, but alternatively by the existing Security Council or another broadly representative multilateral body like NATO.

Major Threats And Challenges

The Middle East: Preventing the cradle of civilizations from becoming the cradle of global conflict must be a top priority. Any long-term solution in the Middle East must include a comprehensive twostate solution in Israel and Palestine; the United States should take the lead in doing everything possible to advance this goal or get caught trying. This push for peace should be accompanied by a steady process of institution building to establish a framework of liberty under law among Middle Eastern nations. In an effort to combat radicalization in Middle Eastern states, the United States should make every effort to work with Islamic governments and Islamic/Islamist movements, including fundamentalists, as long as they disavow terrorism and other forms of civic violence.

America must take considerable risks to ensure that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapons capacity. However, we must also be prepared to offer Iran assurances that assuage its legitimate fears, such as a negative security assurance, the reliable provision to it of peaceful fissile materials, and international influence commensurate with its position. On the other hand, the United States should make it clear that life as a nuclear weapons power, if it came to pass, would be a thoroughly miserable experience for Iran.

The United States should make it clear to Iraqis that we remain willing and ready to do everything we can to rebuild Iraq and to train and support a government that is up to PAR, but that this will not be sustainable in the context of a full-scale civil war. In cooperation with the Iraqi government, America should establish a series of benchmarks that would allow U.S. forces to redeploy inside Iraq – to places where they can be useful in building order and avoid becoming entangled in internecine civil conflict– and outside Iraq. The United States must also work with the European Union and Russia to prevent a spillover of the Iraqi conflict into the rest of the region; this effort should include the provision of incentives to regional powers to behave responsibly and the imposition of costs on those countries that exacerbate the crisis.

Global Terror Networks: Framing the struggle against terrorism as a war similar to World War II or the Cold War lends legitimacy and respect to an enemy that deserves neither; the result is to
strengthen, not degrade, our adversary. Labeling terrorists as Islamic warriors has a similar effect. Terror networks represent a global insurgency with a criminal core; our response must take the form of a global counterinsurgency that utilizes a range of tools, particularly law enforcement, intelligence, and surgical military tools, such as special forces. Our priorities must be to prevent the formation of a nexus between terror networks and nuclear weapons, to destroy the hard core of terrorists, and to peel away terrorist supporters and sympathizers. The ability of terror networks to dictate the agenda of the world’s leading powers is a crucial source of their strength; the United States must not dance to this tune. In the longer run, building a world of liberty under law will make it harder for specific grievances and fanatical ideologies to take root and grow into global violence.

The Proliferation and Transfer of Nuclear Weapons: The world is on the cusp of a new era of nuclear danger. Life in a nuclear crowd promises to be unstable and fraught with peril, from the risk of the collapse of a nuclear state to the potential failure of deterrence in a sea of uncertainty. These problems are not separate but part of a general breakdown of the global non-proliferation regime. Thus, we must reform and revive the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by revising Article IV to allow non-nuclear weapons states nuclear energy but not nuclear capacity and by taking concrete steps to live up to our commitment under Article VI to reduce our dependence on nuclear weapons. We should also use aggressive counter-proliferation measures, including locking down all insecure nuclear weapons and materials, building on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict the trade in nuclear materials, and developing plans to intervene effectively if a nuclear-weapons state like Pakistan or North Korea collapses.

The Rise of China and Order in East Asia: The rise of China is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. America’s goal should not be to block or contain China, but rather to help it achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order and to become a responsible stakeholder in Asian and international politics. In Asia more broadly, America should aim to build a trans-Pacific, rather than pan-Asian, regional order – that is, one in which the United States plays a full part. The U.S.-Japan alliance should remain the bedrock of American strategy in East Asia, but the United States should also seek the creation of an East Asian security institution that brings together the major powers – China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and America – for ongoing discussions about regional issues. At the same time, we should continue to strengthen ties with Asia’s other emerging power, India, and should formulate policies throughout the region based on the principle that sustained economic growth in Asian countries other than China is the key to managing China’s rise.

A Global Pandemic: Highly infectious diseases represent a national security threat of the first order– even though they are not guided by a human hand. Health experts currently warn of the apocalyptic danger of an avian influenza pandemic, which has the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people. Indeed, AIDS already poses a grave security threat. To combat the threat of a another global pandemic, we must invest more in our public health system, provide adequate resources and training to our first responders, build the capacity of foreign governments that are least equipped to deal with disease outbreaks, and create an incentive structure in at-risk countries to ensure that they take necessary public health measures in a timely fashion.

Energy: Massive U.S. consumption of oil threatens American security by transferring an enormous amount of wealth from Americans to autocratic regimes and by contributing to climate change and degradation of the environment. The only solution to these problems is to decrease our dependence on oil and provide incentives for investments in energy alternatives. Toward this end the United States should adopt a national gasoline tax that would start at fifty cents per gallon and increase by twenty cents per year for each of the next ten years. This measure should be accompanied by stricter automobile fuel efficiency standards. The United States should also lead international efforts to deal with climate change, seeking a third way between the Kyoto Protocol’s requirements for emission reductions and opposition to any binding constraints.

Building a Protective Infrastructure: The United States must build a stronger protective
infrastructure – throughout our society, our government, and the wider world – that helps prevent threats and limits the damage once they materialize. In our society, we must strengthen our public health system, repair a broken communications system, and reform public education so that students attain the skill sets required to achieve our national security objectives. In our government, we need to create “joined-up government;” de-politicize threat assessment; integrate relevant but neglected portfolios, such as economics and health, into the national security policy-making process; and reach out to the private sector. In the wider world, we must work through networks of security officials to contain immediate threats before they reach our shores and should consider defining our border protections beyond our actual physical borders.