Wes Clark Raised The Bar

Patrick Doherty

January 31, 2006

Last year,  Steve Clemons triggered a minor political landslide by giving former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft a platform to express his assessment that Iraq was showing signs of "incipient civil war." This year, Steve, now the director of the American Strategy program at the New America Foundation, expanded breadth of his realist assault on the neoconservative status quo, and the main event was former Supreme Allied Commander-Europe, Wes Clark.

Yesterday's event, held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, thanks to liberal Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, brought together a range of "realist" opinion from "liberal internationalists" like Anatol Lieven and Amb. Wendy Sherman to "neoconservative realists" such as John O'Sullivan from the Hudson Institute. Generally, the two main panels represented a national security echo of the macro-economic assessment of the Bush administration coming out of Davos  last week: America under George W. Bush is in a self-inflicted decline.

It was against that backdrop of educated cynicism that Wes Clark addressed the assembly, and he only reinforced this emerging consensus. Clark believes that the state of our union is imperiled.

The former four star bases his assessment on numerous indicators of economic and political health—issues with which readers of TomPaine.com will be quite familiar. For this observer of Washington politics, however, the politically novel— and potentially quite powerful—analysis was Clark's assertion that America lacks an over-arching strategy for engaging the world. For Clark, this core strategic failing can be traced back to the end of the Cold War: "When we lost our opponent, we lost our strategy...at home and abroad." Now, according to Clark, "We must set the course right."

This, my friends, is significant. Gen. Wesley Clark just raised the bar of presidential debate in 2008. If this can be sustained, America may be talking about grand strategy at long last.

Ah, but what is grand strategy? In a nutshell, grand strategy is the correlation of America's economic engine and national security apparatus to achieve America's purpose in the current era. This is the level of strategy that orders our policies both at home and abroad, as Clark mentioned. The last American grand strategy was generated for the Cold War, when the engine of suburban expansion enabled America to contain communist ideology and deter Soviet aggression.

You see, until now, Democrats, including Wes Clark ca. 2004—but especially John Kerry—challenged not the president's post-9/11 grand strategy but the implementation of it. In effect, the Democrats agreed to follow Bush's strategic lead. Thus we had the awkward situation of Kerry voting for and against the war in Iraq. Or the whining Democratic complaints that Bush let Osama Bin Laden escape in the mountain battle of Tora Bora.

Democrats were not willing to say that Iraq was a powerful strategic blunder. Kerry even agreed with Bush that the low likelihood threat of nuclear terrorism should be at the center of our national security planning. Instead of saying Bush took America in the wrong direction, Democrats said Bush lead us in the right direction and is simply doing a lousy job.

Where in 2004 Americans were hungering for something bold, new, hopeful and strategic they instead got something nuanced, parsed, qualified and tactical. Americans don't like complainers, they like leaders. By boldly referencing the lack of any effective grand strategy guiding American policy both at home and abroad, Clark has raised the bar going into 2008.

That was the good news. The bad news is that once he set that bar, this former Rhodes scholar failed to clear the bar himself.

Clark began rhetorically strong, saying first that we must clean up Washington, focusing on two very real threats to our democracy, Bush's ordering of the NSA wiretapping and the Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay/GOP corruption scandal. This resonated quite strongly and seemed a fine warm up for the general's new strategic framework; for the Clark Doctrine, I was thinking to myself.

But it was not to be. What was promised was not delivered.  What followed was a laundry list of first domestic, then foreign issues. Instead of announcing a new economic engine free of strategic, social and environmental dysfunction, Clark reverted to the standard Democratic litany: education, health care, innovation, energy independence, rebuilding unions and an updated version of the G.I. Bill. While his list included some new issues like universal public pre-school and movement toward a universal single-payer health care system, it was merely a list, not an economic engine. Taken as a whole, his list will not deal decisively with our nation's problems.

On the foreign policy side, Clark dealt mostly with crises. Iraq, Syria, Iran, Israel/Palestine, terrorism—all filled out his other list. The one standout policy was a declaration that it is time to talk to Iran directly. His remaining new ideas were interesting but secondary, such as a new Atlantic Charter to bind America and Europe tightly as we move forward; a stronger alliance with India; and an effort to rebuild the international order. But without a transformed domestic economy, Clark was unable to say how he would drain the terrorist swamp, avoid strategic confrontation with China or reverse global warming.

Had Clark not mentioned our clear and present need for America to coalesce around a new strategic consensus as we did during the Cold War, I could have said Clark's speech showed a willingness to take on a variety of issues without bowing to fuzzy-headed conventional thinking here in Washington. Pushing for universal single-payer health care and declaring that it is time for America to start a dialogue with Iran are two brave positions to take in this town. Coming from a four-star Vietnam vet from Arkansas, it could be formidable.

But Wes Clark chose instead to acknowledge the looming absence of a sustainable American grand strategy—and promptly reverted to Bob Shrum's political playbook. A general should know better: a list does not a strategy make. America needs—and the polls show America wants—a new vision, a strategic vision.

The general now has a choice. He can either scrap the allusions to grand strategy or he can develop one. If he scraps the acknowledgement of our strategic disability, he consents to play on the Shrum-ian battlefield against the likes of Hillary Clinton. If he instead embraces our strategic deficit, he can rise above the fray.