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Donald Rumsfeld, Dangerous Man

By Robert Wright
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

I hereby deem the Bush administration to be embroiled in a major conflict of interest. Unfortunately, this isn't the kind of conflict of interest that grabs the attention of the Washington press corps—the kind involving small sums of money and petty greed. Rather, it involves substantive policy issues and the fate of the world. It is, in short, a story without legs. But I'll flog it anyway.

The conflict starts with the fact that President-elect Bush, his vice president, and his secretaries of state and defense support building a national missile defense. Now, there is nothing wrong with holding this view (unless you consider supporting an epically bad idea "wrong"). The real wrongness arises by virtue of how prominently these people have identified themselves with this particular bad idea, and the way this identification may compromise other, ostensibly separate, policy decisions.

Take America's recently improving relations with North Korea, for example. All other things being equal, drawing a previously isolated and seemingly belligerent Stalinist regime into the web of modern civilization would seem to be a good thing. But what if a) you have prominently pinned your administration's stature to building a national missile defense system; and b) the logic behind missile defense depends crucially on the existence of isolated, belligerent regimes?

That the Bush administration has moved missile defense to the top of its agenda was evident from yesterday's New York Times. A front-page article recounts how Bush on Monday dramatically "summoned senior lawmakers from both parties" to build support for "his two top defense goals," one of which is missile defense.

The same article explained one reason that Bush feels he must move ahead pronto with missile defense. If preliminary construction isn't underway by this spring, then completion will be delayed past the time when the United States could, according to official estimates, "face the threat of long-range missile attack from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq." (And who arrived at these official estimates? A commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, who will be Bush's secretary of defense.)

The naive reader—or a reader low in testosterone—might ask, "Wait, since there are already gobs of nuclear warheads in Russia and China that could reach us, and Bush isn't arguing that they warrant a national missile defense, why would adding a handful of warheads to that array warrant a national missile defense?"

The more-or-less official answer is that leaders of "rogue states," in contrast to leaders of nonrogue states, wouldn't be deterred by fear of the retaliatory strike that nuclear attack on the United States would bring. I will not here revisit the absurdity of this answer. For present purposes, the point is just that, if Kim Jong-il keeps showing up on television chatting amiably with American officials—as he did in a groundbreaking encounter with outgoing Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—this absurdity could become dangerously evident to the viewing public. Americans might start to suspect Kim of being human and possessing such characteristic human traits as an aversion to death. They might start to ask why plain old nuclear deterrence—which kept America safe from a series of Soviet Commie dictators during the Cold War—couldn't keep America safe from a North Korean Commie dictator.

Would Bush actually sit around with Rumsfeld and Colin Powell strategizing about how to delay the thaw in relations with North Korea that the Clinton administration set in motion? I doubt it. But conflicts of interest can work their magic more subtly, even unconsciously. At the very least, we can safely say that, so long as Bush is trying to sell the nation on missile defense, he will have no political interest in rapprochement with North Korea, or for that matter with Iran or Iraq.

If anyone in the administration is to resist this corrupting logic, it will probably be Powell. True, in his inaugural press conference as secretary of state designee, he called missile defense an "essential part" of overall American strategy. But he also acknowledged international opposition to missile defense and even used the word "negotiations" to describe future discussions with the international community on the subject. And, as secretary of state, he will naturally be more sensitive to that community than Rumsfeld will. (The Times, in an excellent Rumsfeld profile published on Monday, envisioned possible conflict between Rumsfeld and Powell on this issue.)

What's more, Powell, as a famous general, has no need to prove his manhood with macho defense policies. (Coming from the military, he may be more intent on proving his civility.) In contrast, Rumsfeld, during his previous tenure as secretary of defense, was known to go around bragging that he could do 25 one-handed push-ups.

As the Times noted in its profile of Rumsfeld, he was also known back then as a fierce and deft infighter. He masterfully sabotaged a SALT II arms agreement during the Ford administration, blindsiding no less formidable a player than Henry Kissinger and seriously annoying Ford himself. In the coming months, as the political logic of missile defense clashes with the logic of sound diplomacy, this man bears watching.

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Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


The immediate motivation for NMD has been postulated by recent pundits and politicians as being defense from rogue states and other such 3rd rate powers. This has the quaint appeal to the masses in posing that some ragged Asian potentate dislikes LA so much that he will lob a missile somewhere between Pasadena and the sea thereby saving the earthquake the trouble of dumping the mess into the sea someday. You get the gee whiz response from the masses, "Are you saying we have no defense against such international banditry and terrorism?" And the answer is, no we don't have any defense from any missiles or suitcase bombs a la Tom Clancy either.

Will any 2005 NMD system defeat an Iranian or Korean missile strike conducted by 3-10 missiles of debatable reliability? I work in this area and I would guess not, for cost as well as technical reasons. But simply instilling a doubt that the missiles that actually work may finally be shot down may well predispose any aggressive potentate towards caution and away from desperate methods. What is the point of starting a nuclear war if you might not cause any damage in the first strike?

More important for the U.S., consider the 20-50 year technological development cycle. The first system will almost certainly be failure-prone. Considering the failure of the CSS Huntley (the Confederate sub) one might conclude that pursuing undersea boats was stupid also, and yet we now have nuclear subs as a critical part of the Navy. NMD and Theatre Missile Defense will be comparable. If you don't have the initiative to start somewhere, when you really need it then it won't be there.

Logically, nuclear disarmament would be preferable to spending on both a nuclear deterrant and defense system, but historically the odds are against any progress in this direction. The only realistic directions which are available for the U.S. is for the U.S. to deter aggression by adopting policies and equipping forces which make attacking the U.S. difficult or unacceptably costly.

--Tom R.

(To reply, click here.)


Lets see if I understand correctly your argument. Because the Bush administration wants a particular type of defense, they will unconsciously act in a manner that supports that view, even to the detriment of the Nation as you see it. Further, that this is a conflict of interest.

The corollary of your argument is, I suppose, that the Clinton administration had to act in the opposite manner, unconsciously pandering to these same nations in an attempt to prove that the Missile Defense is unnecessary. But that this is good, as pandering to these Nations is in the interest of the U.S.

This is an insidious train of logic. It implies all politicians (or is it just those whose views you don't agree with?) will act against American Interests when it provides support for enunciated policies at home. I tried very hard to reject this kind of thinking when Clinton was besieged here at home--I would hate to think those raids were unconscious attempts to support his position at home. I would hate to think that his Serb tactics were a result of trying to get support for his enunciated foreign policy at the expense of the national interest. I disagreed strongly with many of his actions but tried to at least assume that he was doing his best as Commander in Chief.

Republicans have generally enunciated a harder line against rogue States. The new administration has enunciated a policy of building a defense against small numbers of missiles. Voila, you have taken two generally stated, well-established policies, and connected them with the darkest of motives even before they have been executed.

--Michael Murray

(To reply, click here.)

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