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| November 19, 2007 6:00 AM
Path to Victory
Refashioning institutions for the challenges of the 21st century.
An NRO Primary Document
Editor’s Note: Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld received the 2007 Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award in honor of Sir Winston S. Churchill on November 17, 2007, and delivered the following remarks (as released by the secretary, exclusively to National Review Online).
This past year has certainly provided ample entertainment for those interested in politics. The activities of Congress and the unexpected blessing of an extra year of presidential campaigning fill our newspapers, televisions, and blogs. The problem is that this entertainment tends to focus on the petty and the personal, and seems to avoid a serious discussion of the emerging challenges our country and the next president, Republican or Democrat, will face in the coming four years. This evening I want to talk a bit about some of those challenges in this still young and uncertain century.
The statesman we honor this evening knew a thing or two about challenges. He also knew something about the capacity of the people of the United States to overcome them. In 1946, Winston Churchill traveled halfway across the continent with President Harry Truman to Fulton, Missouri — in America’s heartland — to warn of an unpleasant truth: that the great burdens of leadership in a new, emerging struggle with the Soviet Union would fall to the United States.
It is instructive to recall that Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” remarks were roundly condemned as needlessly provocative in certain important quarters. Stalin declared Churchill a “warmonger,” who, like Hitler, sought to impose a “racist,” “imperialist” agenda. U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes and his undersecretary, Dean Acheson, refused to attend an event in Churchill’s honor some days after the speech. The Chicago Sun called Churchill a “blinded aristocrat… marching to the world’s most ghastly war.”
Only nine months prior to his remarks at Fulton — even before guns had fallen silent in the Pacific — British voters, weary of war, had unceremoniously ousted their great leader from office. After six years of conflict, millions of Europeans were left impoverished. Americans mourned the 300,000 of our own who perished on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, and on the islands of the Pacific. Recovery from the recent war — not confrontation in a new war — was the desire and indeed, the imperative of the day.
Thoughtful people do not relish the prospect of conflict. Indeed, Americans have assumed the responsibilities of global leadership more reluctantly than any people in history. Today is no different. But the challenges and threats in clear view now — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere — cannot be ignored, wished away, or turned from any more today than in 1946.
Again the United States and her allies in the free world are engaged in a struggle that will likely test the patience and resolve of free people for many years, if not decades to come.
Ours is a globe speckled with violent extremists, rogue regimes, ungoverned areas, weapon proliferators, and aspiring despots seeking to turn democratic nations into personal fiefdoms. And on that note, one can’t help but applaud King Juan Carlos of Spain for his recent blunt advice to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. One would think that the damage being done in Venezuela would be of interest to our country. The constitution of Venezuela is being torn up piece by piece, yet how little we hear about it in the press.
Today’s emerging threats create a new array of problems — problems considerably more complex and less predictable than during the bipolar period of the Cold War. In the 21st century, the lines between nation-states and non-state entities, secular and religious groups, and sectarian factions can blur. Unlike the Cold War, these enemies are not a part of any formal pact, alliance or axis. They do not possess traditional armies, navies or air forces capable of winning even a single battle against the most formidable fighting force the world has ever seen — the United States military.
We have entered a period in which those seeking to engage the United States wisely avoid direct military conflict, and instead resort to asymmetric warfare and irregular conflict — through proxies, terrorist attacks against soft targets, and most certainly cyber warfare. Though U.S. generals on the ground have seen some positive signs recently, they advise that by providing arms to sectarian proxies, Iran has been working to destabilize a newly democratic Iraq. And should the Iranian regime obtain a nuclear weapon, most would probably agree that it could inject a dangerous instability into the region.
This is a time in which warfare is being waged in the realms of space and cyberspace. In China, the recent test of an anti-satellite missile has shown that our network of satellites could be vulnerable to an attack that could cripple both U.S. military and civilian communications. Small bands of organized hackers earlier this year demonstrated by their attacks on Estonia, that the governments and financial institutions of advanced nations can be paralyzed through cyber attacks.
These enemies have learned a crucial lesson about warfare in the 21st century — a lesson others seem slow in understanding. Today’s conflicts are not only won on the battlefield, but through the use of websites and blogs, over the airwaves and on the front pages of our newspapers. Through skillful propaganda operations, the enemy successfully leverages their asymmetric attacks to encourage potential recruits to join their violent cause and to try to convince those of us in free nations to give in to hopelessness, self-doubt and despair.
Their decentralized networks have been able to effectively employ the tools of the Information Age, while the U.S. government remains ponderous, muscle-bound and unable to respond in real time to the deceits of these enemies.
To succeed in this first struggle of the 21st century, we will need fresh thinking and capabilities well beyond the Defense Department. If free people are to meet the challenges posed by what will be a long struggle against violent extremists, we will need all elements of national power, private as well as public — diplomatic, economic, as well as intelligence and military to work in concert. We will need to rethink and rearrange our domestic and global institutions designed for the Industrial Age to better suit the Information Age.
The United States cannot fashion effective approaches to challenges of the 21st century alone. The threats to global security — weapons proliferation, terrorism, drugs, trafficking in persons, to name a few — cannot be solved by any single nation. Responsible free nations will need to come to grips with the new and unfamiliar and, and with the U.S., develop new approaches that are effective, congenial to our domestic audiences, and mutually reinforcing.
Fashioning global strategies and institutions for the new and unfamiliar is, after all, what defines statesmanship. In the first years of the Cold War, Winston Churchill and President Harry Truman, persuaded their skeptical publics that the threat posed by the Soviet Union would require bold leadership, new institutions and broad international support. For Truman’s part, within months of Churchill’s speech at Fulton, his administration sponsored the Marshall Plan, promulgated the Truman Doctrine, developed the strategy of containment, and led in fashioning the institutions necessary for the free world to prevail against Communism.
At home, the Truman administration reached across the aisle to Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and other Republicans to create the Department of Defense, Radio Free Europe, the CIA, the National Security Council. Globally, Truman and his administration built an international consensus and worked with our allies to fashion the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and the IMF, to mention a few.
But nothing is forever. However valuable in the past, the institutions of the post-World War II period — Industrial Age institutions — have not adapted sufficiently to keep pace with the decentralized networks of the thinking enemies we face today, now well into the Information Age.
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