FOREIGN POLICY, Spanish Edition Interview with Professor Stanley

							                        FOREIGN POLICY, Spanish Edition
                     Interview with Professor Stanley Hoffmann
                   Center for European Studies-Harvard University
                                     11/4/2004
                                   Sebastián Royo

SR- How would the second (Bush) administration be any different from the first one?

SH: I would be surprised if it was different. If there are changes, they might come from
two different sources. One would be in the area of foreign affairs, from a result in
changes in personnel. If people like Rumsfeld and Powell leave he will have to replace
them and in the whole foreign affairs field, the influence of personality remains strong.
The second one, which is perhaps even bigger: if he tries to pursue simultaneously both
his domestic policy, which is very ambitious, and his foreign policy in the manner in
which foreign policy was pursued in the past few year, there will have to be some very
tough decisions.
        Are other countries going to be willing to finance the huge American deficit,
especially if its foreign policy is waged as unilaterally and sometimes clumsily as it has
been? He will have very big decisions to make about how to keep fighting in Iraq. One
will need more forces and since he has political reasons not to resort to the draft,
especially since the military has been profoundly unhappy about the responsibilities that
have been dumped on them. So there will have to be choices and priorities on how to
spend the money and that will lead to some modifications.
        I think that he is probably more attached deep down to his domestic agenda, on
foreign affairs he has had at least two different agendas already: In the first nine months
of his administration, and then after Sept 11th. They are completely different. But if he
has to choose between a highly costly and ambitious external agenda and his domestic
one, now that he has a majority of Congress he will opt for his domestic one, I would
imagine that he could announce that we have won the war on terrorism, that it is going
well, that we have to turn to other issues. We have reached the stage where we have to
entrust the security of Iraq to the Iraqis themselves… So there is a little more freedom of
maneuver in foreign affairs and absolutely no desire for modification in domestic affairs
because the opportunities are just to tempting on completely transforming the judicial
system for the next four years. He could appoint his own judges all over the place and it
would be hard to stop him. It would be highly conservative agenda on tax cuts and the
transformation of social security and so on. I don’t seem him giving that up it is a chance
of reversing pretty much everything that has been done since the New Deal.

SR- Related to what you just described, during the first administration the Republicans
were divided between the realists and the neo-conservatives. Do you think that the neo-
conservatives will continue dominating the administration?

SH: I think that they will still be in it but whether they will dominate it will depend again
on those new appointments. They are not people who will give up easily, they have been
around for a long time, they are quite indoctrinated, they have a vision of the world that is
not always true of the model of the realists, they are much better in telling what one



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should not do than what one should do and I think that some of them will undoubtedly
stay in their positions.

SR- But will the realists fight? I read recently and interview in the Financial Times with
Scrowford, former NSA of Bush father, and he was very critical of Bush’s policies both
domestically and internationally

SH: He has been very outspoken and I think that he really speaks for Bush’s father. The
people elected in Congress if they feel that Bush really has this solid base of popularity in
the country will not go very far in opposing him. So far they have talked more than they
have acted. Then again we will have to see the changes in the major chairmanships in the
committees in congress but I doubt it.

SR- Do you think that there will be any changes in Congress?

SH: Well there are interesting little things. The next chairman of the judiciary committee
of the Senate, which is a very important committee since they have to approve the
appointments to the Supreme Court and federal judges, will be Specter who is very much
a moderate and who already said that he had advised the President to select moderates to
the Supreme Court. Otherwise I don’t see any great changes since all the incumbents
have been reelected. It is the Democrats who have to find a new minority leader in the
Senate. The Republicans have a very good position on the whole so I don’t see much
resistance coming from there.

SR- What do you think will be the main foreign policy objectives for the new
administration?

SH: I think that presenting everything as linked or dependent on the war on terrorism has
been a very good trick/central concept, there is no reason he should abandon it. Because
you can do anything with that and also it means that you can become the ally of Sharon,
become the ally of Putin, which doesn’t seem to cause any particular moral problems. It
is a flattering situation to be commander in chief of the world; in effect I think the main
questions are specific ones such as what to do with Iraq. I don’t think that anyone has a
genuine plan. The campaign on both sides was extremely disappointing, but decision will
have to be made, because of the impossible tasks for 170,000 soldiers. Secondly, he will
have to decide quickly what to do if anything with Iran. I don’t think he can want to
attack North Korea because they have nuclear weapons and Seoul is so close to the
border between the two Koreas and they couldn’t really in that case act without the
Chinese and the Japanese and the South Koreans. I think that it will be a protractive
negotiation. Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet and could be an area in which this
doctrine of preventive war might be used. I don’t see an invasion of Iran. I don’t see the
troops for it but an attack on the nuclear installations is not at all impossible.

SR- Do you think, for example, that Israel could do it?




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Israel could do it but whether Israel would want to do it, I am not sure. There is no
country, which has a better, clear sense of their hard-line interests than Israel. Iran does
have conventional weapons and missiles that can hit Israel, but whether Israel will want
to do that in order to be nice to the Americans who have been so nice to them, I do not
know. I think that Sharon has his hands full with the internal problem that he faces with
the retreat from Gaza but it is not totally ruled out. So that is possible. However, I don’t
think that that would fool anybody; anybody would know that they would be acting as
substitutes for the US and that is something that will have to be decided very soon.
        I don’t see Bush changing his attitude toward international conventions and
international organizations; I think that his distrust of the European Union will be as big
as ever, his temptation to keep it divided will be as big as ever. I don’t see any reason
why he would redefine his foreign policy, unless financial and material considerations
lead him to say that we can do everything at once. So far, he has been willing to increase
the deficit that future generations will have to cope with.

SR- Is there any possibility that those constraints will force him to move in a more
multilateral direction?

SH: The choice of the Secretary of Defense will be really important, on the other hand, I
am not sure that the allies of the US or at least those that have been helpful so far will
become more helpful in the case like Iraq by providing troops. I don’t see that at all. As
for providing assistance it is a vicious circle. There is no point in providing assistance as
long as there is no security and I don’t think that there will be a lot of security as long as
the military actions in Iraq provoke more hostilities on the part of the Iraqis. What he will
do to try to break this, I have no clue. In a sense the ideal solution would be to have
elections in January, at least as widely as possible, which would create an Iraqi
parliament and government that would ask the Americans to get out by a certain time. I
don’t see how the US remaining there will be able to protect the Iraqis against each other
and that isn’t a problem that anyone has treated very seriously.

SR- This is an argument that you have developed in your article in the New York Review
of Books in which you advocate pulling out. Do you think that this option will never be
considered?

SH: No, no I don’t think even Kerry would have considered it.

SR: You don’t think Kerry would have considered it? I realize that he had to say this to
win in the elections, but I wonder what he would have said the day after.

SH: He is surrounded by people many of whom are friends, in fact when you came I was
just signing a letter I wrote to the New Work Review of Books in response to a supporter
of Kerry who said that my piece was pure defeatism. He is surrounded by many well-
meaning people. I was going to say perhaps a bit nastily, that Americans have trouble to
concede and even to conceive of defeat. Ultimately we should get out, we shouldn’t keep
bases, and we shouldn’t monopolize all the contracts. Because of all our commitments we




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have to restore security first and it seems to me that there a many good reason why we
cant do that, so there are very fundamental disagreements there.

SR- How do you see Europe now in international affairs?

SH: I think that for Europe, which is slightly ironic, this is a great opportunity. All these
beliefs that there are only two countries that could unify the Europeans, one was the
USSR and it failed because deterrence worked and the Soviet threat became more and
more imagined. So the US wanted to take Western Europe and the Soviets didn’t show
any great desire to cross the iron curtain. The only other country that could unify the
Europeans was the United States by talking them into solidarity and coherence. In fact, it
seems to me that if one looks at the role of the US objectively, the role of the US was
almost since the European integration was launched, from the point of view of the
cohesive Europe, trying to be a world power trying to have an influence in foreign
security. The US influenced not deliberately, but simply by being there.
        The issue of defense plays a divisive role. The Germans would say well yes but
militarily we can’t but anyhow the Americans will pay for our defense so to speak. The
British, as usual, playing followers to America.
        It took evidence of wanton American hostility to push the Europeans together.
Now that hostility exists only in the last three years and I am not talking about treaty
disputes or integration that has always existed, but on issues of foreign policy, such as
issues on to how to deal with the Middle East in general; the Palestinian issue, the whole
issue of the Arab and Muslin world. The alignment of Bush with Sharon has been seen as
almost a provocation, and I think that many of the Bush supporters still count on the
influence that the US has on Eastern Europe I think that they overestimate the degree of
the influence.
        I think that many of those countries as very eager to become “good Europeans”
and if they are treated decently, and if Chirac stops insulting them, there will be much
more of a sense on common interests in the areas around Europe such as the Muslim
world, Africa and the Middle East. I am afraid that once more the Europeans will be
spending most time on the building of institutions than on more central issues, but at least
there is an opportunity.

SR- Do you think that the Europeans should just wait to see what happens?

SH: I think they won’t have to wait very long.

SR- I see this as an opportunity to move forward in the common and security policy
because they might realize that they don’t have allies they can rely on. Secondly, maybe it
will rally European citizens in support of the European constitution.

SH: If I were in Chirac’s place I would use this geopolitical opportunity as a way of
overcoming the resistance to the Constitution. Saying, look lets not do something totally
foolish by rejecting what is a step forward. It is also important to look at the opportunities
that the situation offers then spending years arguing about the Turkish entry, it will take a
long time anyhow.



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SR- And do you think that it is doable, that they will advance the common foreign and
security policy?

SH: Yes, they will never be taken seriously if they don’t. I don’t know if you have seen
the last issue of Foreign Affairs, but there is a quite extraordinary article by an American
who I don’t know anything about, about how we should save NATO from the Europeans,
which is a very strange idea frankly. But which indicated essentially the feelings of many
people from this administration, about any European attempt of having a will of its own.

SR- Many people claim that NATO can be used as an important instrument to build
bridges.

SH: NATO has played a very useful role in Afghanistan, one should remember that
Afghanistan was unanimous. I don’t know what other bridges it can build, I don’t see the
Germans in or out of NATO sending forces to stabilize Iraq and if NATO it simply what
one American military official once explained on television: NATO is the US plus Great
Britain, the rest does not count, that is not exactly a bridge to anything. I think much will
depend on Blair’s own decisions. I cannot believe that a man as intelligent as him does
not realize that the influence he had on the US in policy has been almost null. England
could play a European card and could do so without provoking the same distress.

SR- Do you think that there is anything that this administration can do to convince the
European countries to contribute in Iraq?

SH: No, I really don’t. It is very hard to convince people to send troops to be shot at and
killed for a cause in which they do not believe. If one looks at the state of public opinion
in all of Europe, they aren’t favorable to the war so I think the hope now is that they can
be persuaded to help with economic assistance and state building. As I was saying earlier,
you can’t really do that if there is no security. I have a British friend here who was on the
British controlled zone in Iraq and he compares the situation in Iraq to the state of nature
according to Hobbes, the war of everybody against everybody, nothing gets done, bombs
explode all over. However, this administration keeps saying that things are getting better,
an if we now know that we have those elections resort to a massive military efforts to
reconquer cities that are essentially controlled by the insurgents is only going to make
more enemies among the Iraqis. Why would anybody really, who is not already there, get
into the trap with us? And I think that they must realize this.

SR- It seems clear that to stay in the course, will not do anything. It will not improve the
situation on the ground, it will not bring security, do you think that eventually they will
realize this?

SH: I think that they have realized this, which is why the talk seems to be more now
about prolonging the length of service of national guards, or finding more volunteers, I
don’t think there is any real hope of getting more foreign cooperation.




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SR- Do you see a parallel between the situation in Iraq and Vietnam or Algiers?

SH: There are many parallels with Vietnam in the sense that in both cases the US got into
a situation without having any idea as to what to do next and got itself into an
extraordinarily complicated culture about which it new nothing. Americans will never see
themselves as colonialists.
        With regards to Algiers, it is easier for Americans to disengage from Iraq, there
were half a million of Americans fighting in Vietnam so people were very excited, I think
one of the reasons why Iraq did not become an enormous issue in the election was that it
is an army of volunteers, there are only 140, 000 of them. And among the population,
students included, are spectators, so there is no immediate sense of emergency if you like.
I would be easier for an administration and I don’t mean this one, to do what the Senate
did in the time of Vietnam, which was to proclaim victory and leave.
        But it could be done and I don’t think that it would provoke much of a drama.
We’ve reached a stage where the families of the soldiers who are there are trying to send
armor to their sons. So I don’t think that there are quite the same implications. I think
more and more people will see Iraq as a combination of mistakes, wrong assumptions and
bad intelligence but at this point it doesn’t have the dimensions of a national tragedy.
Vietnam did have those dimensions because of the total demoralization of the army of
conscripts who came back completely discombobulated.

SR- One thing that this administration has been extremely successful has been to link
Iraq with the war on terror. So people associate Iraq with their security.

SH: Absolutely, but many of them after all, or still 48% of the people did not vote for
Bush and I think that the point which many people recognize as the mistake for going
into this is to connect a country that has no links with terrorism to a nest of terrorists. So I
don’t know to what that will lead. If we are in the business of fabricating terrorists and
the Israelis are in the business of fabricating terrorists, we are in a pretty awful mess. War
forever…

SR- One of the expectations that I had about Kerry was that he would have separated
Iraq from other bilateral or multilateral issues, for example with the Europeans. He
would have said: we have to focus on security and cooperation in other areas, let’s just
disengage all this from the dispute that we have over Iraq.

SH: I don’t know because much of what he said about Iraq was that there was a need to
reconnect with our allies and see what they can contribute. I think he was proposing a
plan that they would never accept, but still was consistent with the rest of his approach to
go back to the UN and so on. So I think that in that sense.

SR- Do you think that this administration will ever consider the disengagement of Iraq
from other issues?

SH: I don’t know, I don’t think so. As soon as the new Secretary of Defense takes a cold
look at the situation, and doesn’t live in a world of illusions, god knows what the effects



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of this will be. I remember that at the end of the Johnson Presidency, it was his new
Secretary of Defense, who had a reputation of being a hawk, who persuaded Johnson that
it was hopeless. But this is not going to happen with Rumsfeld, but it could happen.

SR- From the standpoint of nuclear proliferation which is one of the most important
issues, both Kerry and Bush mentioned in their campaigns that this was the biggest
security threat to the US. What do you think the new administration will do in this area?

SH: The notion, which is not very fashionable, is that the greatest threat of nuclear
weapons and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorist, I have a certain
degree of skepticism. Because we can do a lot of damage without weapons of mass
destruction just by highjacking a few more planes, and I don’t know if too many
countries, which are nuclear powers are terribly willing to lose control over weapons and
give them to terrorist. The danger is unguarded stocks of nuclear weapons in places like
Russia or in Central Asia, privateers such as Khan in Pakistan, but I have trouble seeing
this as a major danger.
        I think the danger is the proliferation to countries who will interpret American
arrogance and unilateralism or these preventive doctrines as an excellent reason for
providing themselves with nuclear weapons. I think that requires a collective policy on
putting restriction on the sale of nuclear material to countries is important. We need to
assure countries that one will not attack them because they do not like their regime or
foreign policy. Not a hopeless thing, we need to look at them case by case. That’s what
lawyers and diplomats have been invented for. I can see a deal in which the Iranians
affirm their right under the non- proliferation treaty to enrich uranium and plutonium,
may agree not do to so in exchange for something. The same for a miserable and starving
country like North Korea in which we may end up with a deal in which it accepts
economic aid in exchange for not developing their nuclear program. It is not impossible
to see countries changing their course, after all in the history of non-proliferation
countries such as South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and Libya have changed. Not a
hopeless thing, a case by case and will not get too simply by threats; it is important to
have diplomacy first.

SR- What about Iran? What will happen if the European efforts don’t pay off?

SH: A combination of European efforts of negotiation and occasional pressures from the
United Sates, but not too apocalyptic, may produce something but it will be a long
process. Iranian politicians want to be assured that if they make a deal, the US won’t
attack them. Kennedy was very good at that, but this administration is very bad at
diplomacy and it won’t get better if Powell leaves, but they need to find a diplomatic
mind to take Powell’s place.

SR- Would Condoleeza Rice be any different from Powell if she becomes Secretary of
State?

She is very intelligent, I met her in the early 90’s, extremely clear mind, very organized,
and she has a clear mind. How strong a person she would be running American



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diplomacy? I simply don’t know. She was not very effective running national security but
was brilliant as a spokesperson in the last Bush administration and brilliant in negotiation
with Germany in 1991. On the other hand, she has a sense of reality, which shocked both
Rumsfeld and Cheney. If you put her in defense, will she have real power over the very
tough military people that she will have to deal with? And in the state department will
foreign countries take her seriously? Because the experience that they have had with her
has not been very good.

SR- The last subject I want to ask you about is terrorism. Why do we keep on talking
about the war on terror?

SH: That is a very bad expression, it is interesting that when Bush discovered the war on
terrorism two people almost immediately said that it was a bad idea to go on the war on
terrorism. One was British Historian and political scientist, Michael Howard in Foreign
Affairs, who wrote a brilliant piece in the end of 2001, saying that it was a great mistake
to call this a war, it is not a war, it is a long struggle, there is no end in sight there is going
to be no cease-fire, no peace treaty. The other person who said so was Chirac when he
was in Washington DC. He also said that it was a struggle, not a war. But here it pays off,
because Americans are mobilized by the word war, it produces heroic images of victory,
of capitulation, unconditional surrender and so on. It is a terrible mistake, I listened about
5 weeks ago in New York to a speech given at the public library by Dominic de Villespin
who was there for one day as Minister of the Interior, who gave an absolutely brilliant
talk on terrorism, explaining why the French or European conception really differs in the
sense that there are no armies, it is decentralized, it is little groups, while the American
way of treating this is like a battle with a commander in chief, against Bin Laden and
three or four other leaders, and is completely hierarchical, which is completely wrong.
Secondly, explaining that in his view this should be waged in a much lower key manner
without instilling fear in the population and without infringing on ones public liberties.
         I am trying to publish this article at this point, I am waiting for permission. I had
no luck so far, on Foreign Affairs. (Do not publish this in your article). It is a devastating
critique to the US. I called the managing editor and asked why he didn’t take the piece,
and he said he didn’t think it was their role. I sent it to Foreign Policy as well. It was
exactly the average European view: don’t treat this as if the whole of world politics is
attached to the war on terrorism. But this has been so helpful to Bush, because he is a war
time leader, then he had all those lawyers in his office and Cheney’s office writing those
memos to prove that in time of war, the President is above the law and one of those
people who wrote one of those memos has already become a federal judge so it has been
from the point of view of productivity and profitability incredibly helpful to him.

SR- What will it take for people to see through that?

SH: Half of the American public seems to me not only to be very badly informed, but
rely on faith so the facts don’t matter. The majority of the Bush voters believe that Iraq
provided hijackers on September 11th at that point I throw up my hands. It is like the
debate between the evolutionists and the creationists. If you want to deny evolution and
put your faith in creation well fine, but it is hypocrisy? I don’t know.



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SR- Going back to the war on terror, what should we do?

The first thing to do it not to produce more terrorists, and I thing that the US has been
very bad at this. On the panel that I was on yesterday, a British young woman who was a
journalist put it out that it was very difficult for foreign students to come to the US and
not only from the Middle East and for those who come from the Middle East it is very
humiliating, they have to stand in the line for hours. Principle number one, don’t produce
more terrorists and number two is try to resolve the issues like Palestine, which will
continue to produce more and more desperate terrorists. But nobody stops to reflect on
the lives of those young suicide bombers who do this, and who could under normal
circumstances be perfectly normal citizens. And then of course, you have to have police
operations, better intelligent services, cooperation between polices, but that is no different
from the fact of crime in a city. As you remember, when Kerry tried to say something
like this, the Republicans fell on him like a tun of bricks. There is nothing you can do
with those people, etc, etc. This is not something that the US has an experience with.

SR- Do you think this tension between hard power and soft power will change in any
way?

SH: Well, this is not an administration that has a lot of experience with soft power, the
cultural policies in the US has become sometimes ridiculous, and so that’s a big lag.
Again, if you had a first rate Secretary of Sate to whom the President would listen, that
might change a bit but the more one reads about what went on in the administration in the
last few years the more one realizes that Powel was increasingly marginalized, not
consulted, not taken seriously and that was not a happy situation.

SR- For countries like Spain, after pulling out the troop from Iraq, what can we expect?

SH: I don’t think that it will be very different. I don see this administration as willing to
“punish” Spain. What can they do? Last year when they really waged a greater campaign
to punish France, which came inspired from up high, it didn’t work. The French sales to
the US in 2003 increased by 8%, and it was so ridiculous and it just didn’t work. Spain
has nothing to suffer.

SR-There has been some controversy about the Spanish Prime Minister when he went to
Tunisia and stated that every country should follow the Spanish lead in Iraq.

SH: One of the reasons why I think the foreign policy will not change very much is the
presence of Cheney, he is a very intelligent man, with the most gloomy view of the world
imaginable and I do think he has the complete confidence of Bush and he doesn’t have
too much of an esteem for countries that do not follow the US. Unless the person who
replaces Rumsfeld, if he goes, Cheney will have a decisive say on it. He had been
Secretary of Defense before; he had been presidential chief of staff. His influence is a
great one.




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SR- How do you view the role of the US in the world today?

SH: I think it is extremely interesting, it shows something that many people have written
about for years and years, but it was always a bit hyperbolic and theoretical, which is the
impotence of power. You can go into Iraq, you can occupy it and then you are left with a
mess with dimensions that you have absolutely not foreseen. Reconstructing from scratch
the political life of a country, which has never really had any, and doing that with people
who do not speak the language, who don’t know anything about the history of culture. So
it is a wonderful example on how, as somebody once said, you can do anything you
would like. And in many other parts of the world I don’t see how the US can go without
the cooperation of people, with military force there is a lot you can do to destroy but you
can’t rebuild anything. Economically I think that the US is very powerful but as Nye
points out, the world isn’t unipolar, Europe is an important block and China is becoming
increasily important, Japan is not in decline. Economically it is a miltipolar world. The
importance of the US has been security and its influence post-war and the cultural
influence of the US, attracting students from around the world. Indeed, no one can
compete with the US military.
        The US is going through a terrible phase but ultimately there is a capacity for self-
criticism, which is remarkable. Many of them are well meaning people, very open, this is
not an imperial power, it lacks imperial citizens and a few handful of neo-cons advised by
a Scottish historian like my office neighbor from last year isnt going to change this.
        How long will it take? I have enormous confidence in this capacity to overcome
the prejudice. I have this enormous faith in education. This is my fiftieth year teaching in
Harvard and the undergraduate students are so much more interesting than when I first
came. They have traveled they have seen the world, they are open. They are remarkably
devoid of racial and ethnic prejudices, which is wonderful to see and the future elite of
the country is very good. In that sense, as Mr. Kerry used to say, “help is on the way”.
They are so much more mature than the students we had here 45 years ago. They are very
much interested in doing good. I have an enormous regard for this country.




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