Pentagon Cool to U.S. Sharing Its Power : Global role: Planning document outlines strategy for facing challenges to American influence.
WASHINGTON — In the new world created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States must thwart any power that would threaten America’s newly preeminent position and maintain the ability to expand U.S. military forces if a “global competitor†should emerge, according to the Pentagon’s chief planning document.
The secret Defense Planning Guidance for the fiscal years 1994-1999 is the first major revision of U.S. national security strategy since the end of the Cold War. And it decisively rejects calls by several lawmakers and world leaders for the United States to share power with many other players on the world stage.
Instead, it outlines the Bush Administration’s vision of an America that must use its foreign policy apparatus and its military strength to ensure that its friends--including its longtime European allies and Japan--prosper but do not collude to challenge U.S. influence.
The document also deals with the Bush Administration’s politically sensitive opposition to a European security alliance that would exclude the United States and the Administration’s support for an arrangement under which the United States would defend Eastern Europe in the event of an attack from the East.
Although the document rejects the assumption of a “policeman†role for the United States, it assumes that Washington will act as an arbiter of all world developments and asserts that the nation should piece together coalitions of convenience to combat developments that threaten U.S. interests.
“While the U.S. cannot become the world’s ‘policeman,’ by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations,†the classified paper declares.
The Defense Department paper, first reported in Sunday’s editions of the New York Times, drew strong reaction from independent experts who have called for greater international cooperation in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise.
“What these Pentagon planners are laying out is nothing but a Pax Americana,†said Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Where threats to our stability need to be destroyed, the notion that it can only be done by American military power is outmoded,†he added.
“This is an overt attempt to preserve very stark U.S. superiority, and that is going to raise fears of American hegemony all over the world,†added John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. “These are people who have yet to see the nature of the new world and are trying to justify a confrontational security policy in the absence of an enemy. It’s not appropriate and it’s self-defeating. If others think we’re trying to maintain this position, they’ll program to hedge against us.â€
The document, which is circulating among Pentagon leaders in draft form, guides the drafting of Defense Department budgets and the planning of U.S. military strategy. Among key challenges to American interests, it cites a cutoff of access to raw materials--especially to Persian Gulf oil--the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction, the taking of U.S. hostages in terrorist incidents and regional conflicts and threats to U.S. society by narcotics trafficking.
But its most politically charged passages deal with Europe and the former Soviet Union.
France has led Europe, with some success, in calling for the United States to withdraw its troops and allow the East and West Europeans to coordinate their security policies and provide for their own defense. Pentagon leaders have staunchly defended a continued U.S. troop presence in Europe for the near term.
But this marks the first time that Washington has indicated that it wants to close the door firmly on an eventual European security alliance that excludes the United States.
The United States also has resisted publicly granting its former Warsaw Pact military adversaries, the East Europeans, any firm security commitments. But the Defense Planning Guidance states that “the U.S. could also consider extending to the east-central European states security commitments analogous to those we have extended to Persian Gulf states.â€
For the U.S. military, such policies would require the maintenance of a well-trained standing force of 12 active Army divisions, 15 Air Force air wings, two and one-third divisions of Marines and 13 Navy aircraft carrier battle groups.
Eight Army reserve divisions would fill out the ranks in a crisis.
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