In the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, John Lewis Gaddis — Professor of History at Yale and author of "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" — surveys "Grand Strategy in the Second Term."
Gaddis says that "the fact that more than three years have passed without [another major attack on the United States] is significant."
Connecting causes with consequences is always difficult . . . Perhaps al Qaeda planned no further attacks. Perhaps it anticipated that the United States would retaliate by invading Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban. Perhaps it foresaw U.S. military redeployments from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Iraq. Perhaps it expected a worldwide counterterrorist campaign to roll up substantial portions of its network. Perhaps it predicted that the Bush administration would abandon its aversion to nation building and set out to democratize the Middle East. Perhaps bin Laden’s strategy allowed for all of this, but that seems unlikely.
If it did not, then the first and most fundamental feature of the Bush strategy — taking the offensive against the terrorists and thereby surprising them — has so far accomplished its purposes.
Fans of nuance will be heartened that Gaddis criticizes the Bush Administration for failure to persuade more allies to assist, for unnecessarily harsh rhetoric, and for tactical errors in Iraq. But Gaddis concludes the Administration has already accomplished "far more . . . than any previous American administration has achieved in the Middle East."
And Gaddis endorses the most fundamental aspect of the Bush foreign policy:
And what of the [Middle East’s] insulation from the wave of democratization that has swept the globe? According to Freedom House statistics, no countries allowed universal suffrage in 1900. By 1950, 22 did, and by 2000, the number had reached 120, a figure that encompassed 62.5 percent of the world’s population.
Nor, as the examples of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Turkey suggest, is there reason to think that representative government and Islam are incompatible. . . To conclude that it can never take hold [in the Middle East] is to neglect the direction in which the historical winds have been blowing.
And the best grand strategies, like the most efficient navigators, keep the winds behind them.
Gaddis concludes by observing that, in the face of a clear and present danger that materialized on September 11:
A conservative Republican administration responded by embracing a liberal Democratic ideal — making the world safe for democracy — as a national security imperative. If that does not provide the basis for a renewed grand strategic bipartisanship, similar to the one that followed Pearl Harbor so long ago, then one has to wonder what ever would.
Call it the global test for Democrats. Worth reading in its entirety.