The best thing that has happened is that we have validated the idea that there's no such thing as a multinational force or purpose unless one of the group is ready, willing, and able to do it all by itself. The utter incompetence of the U.N. is literally incomprehensible.
Reason: Should the United States withdraw from the United Nations?
Wallop: Yeah. Certainly for any security reasons. We might want to stay in it for the World Health Organization or other reasons not related to security. But the U.N. is becoming a very articu late tool for national decline. We can't do anything without their permission, yet we are unwilling to have them command our troops, yet we are willing to commit our prestige to their judgment. And they can't find a way to act on their own, when their own prestige has been threatened by lack of judgment or an inability to make decisions.
Reason: What general principles do you believe justify military involvement abroad?
Wallop: Historically, this has been a country that operated more surely when it had a doc trinewhether it was the Monroe Doctrine or the containment doctrine or any number of other kinds of doctrinesand very unsurely when it didn't have one or had renounced one.
Doctrines provide an architecture for both Republican and Democrat presidents to carry out policies. They weren't the same from Truman to Kennedy. Eisenhower, Nixon, Fordall of them had a little different idea of what containment was about, but as a general principle, containment of communism was something that appealed to the American people and was the basis upon which a military and foreign policy structure could be invoked.
So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress. The defense budget became increasingly a function of the defense of the local economy and had nothing to do with any military purpose.
In 1990, well before the Gulf War, I went to ask President Bush to put together a new American doctrine. [National Security Adviser Brent] Scowcroft was there and I was very skeptically re ceivedeven with some sort of cynical amusement. They said containment had been necessary because the Soviets had exploded a nuclear bomb, or were about to get the hydrogen bomb, but nothing like that is going on now.
In the few short minutes before I was laughed out of there, I tried to explain that America needed to define its interests. I don't think they're very difficult to define. The first, foremost obliga tion is defense of the homeland. No problem there, I think everybody agrees on that.
We are a trading nation. We need access to our markets and we need for those markets to be reasonably secured. If they're not, we can't trade.
We are a communicating nation which needs access to space, access to the seas.
We are a studying nation. Scholarship from science is important to the whole world and those people need to be able to be safe and secure in what they do.
Our hemisphere is quite important. If there's not security in our hemisphere, there's not secu rity in the homeland.
Finally we are a nation with some conscience. It means alliances are extremely important when they're based on a national interest. We have to have the ability to sustain our presence within those alliances...
Reason: You mean like NATO?
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