Secretary Albright, Meet Dr. No
Last month, as the United
States was Tomahawking Osama Bin Laden, another little-noticed American foreign
policy drama was playing out in the Caribbean. On the tiny island nation of St.
Kitts, a cocaine smuggler named Charles "Little Nut" Miller threatened to
murder American veterinary students at the island's university unless the
United States dropped its efforts to extradite him. A former drug informant and
a dropout from the U.S. witness protection program, Miller has found a safe
haven on St. Kitts, where his bullying and his cash have won him enormous
political influence with the island's shaky government. At the news of Miller's
threat, the State Department flew diplomatic security advisers to St. Kitts to
reassure students; some of the young Americans fled home, and there were even
rumors of a Grenada-like military strike to capture Miller.
The
Miller imbroglio and the assault on Bin Laden would appear to have nothing in
common, but they both illustrate a peculiar development in American foreign
policy: James Bondification.
The United States, born and raised during the age of the
nation-state, is accustomed to thinking of the nation as the natural unit of
foreign policy. The United States negotiates with nations, trades with nations,
issues sanctions against nations, and makes war on nations. But the United
States has begun to realize that it lives in a very different kind of world,
one filling up with what policy types call "nonstate actors" and what
moviegoers recognize as "James Bond villains." The nonstate actors range from
10 cent thugs such as Miller, who has merely shanghaied a small island, to
world-class dastards such as Bin Laden, who runs a supranational organization,
has loyalty to no government, owns a vast fortune and an armory of high-tech
weapons, and is engaged in an elaborate conspiracy so secretive that we were
not aware of it till it smacked us in the head. Habituated to presidents and
prime ministers, we are now dealing with autonomous, mysterious characters
driven by motives that baffle us and who are unchecked by any government. Bin
Laden may not be quite as masterful as Blofeld, and Miller may not be quite as
sinister as Mr. Big, but they're closer to them than we might think.
Nonstate
actors are not, of course, an invention of the '90s. The United States fought
its first war against the Barbary Pirates, who terrorized U.S. shipping in the
Mediterranean at the turn of the 19 th century. More recently, Yasser
Arafat's stateless Palestine Liberation Organization and terrorist groups such
as Hamas and Islamic Jihad built organizations that have shaken governments
around the world. But there is no doubt that the variety and power of nonstate
actors is greater now than it has been for centuries. Bin Laden's worldwide
terror network is currently dominating headlines, but other terrorist groups
are thriving as well. Colombian, Mexican, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian drug
lords have neutralized (or purchased) governments and recruited private armies.
Hong Kong triads have established themselves as autonomous powers in much of
Asia. What was Soviet Central Asia is now a free-fire zone: Drug, mineral, and
arms barons compete for power, while legitimate governments of the region are
patsies by comparison. Even corporations are getting into the Bond business.
Executive Outcomes, a South African mercenary business, recently invaded,
stabilized, and controlled Sierra Leone for a year--interrupting a long-waged
civil war--in order to protect that country's diamond mines.
One reason why this Bondification seems to be
proliferating is the decline of the nation-state. As Robert Kaplan chronicled
in The Ends of the Earth , environmental collapse, tribal conflicts,
overpopulation, and urbanization have undermined Third World governments. For
most of this century, colonial rulers or nationalist dictators dominated
countries, monopolizing power with mighty central governments. But central
authority has vanished in much of Africa and Asia, and nonstate actors have
filled the vacuum. Where anarchy reigns, dollars can buy a private empire. It's
no surprise that Bin Laden chose Sudan and Afghanistan as bases: Neither
country has had a functioning government for 20 years. Bin Laden paid the
Taliban a few million dollars a year and guaranteed himself cover. Drug
dealers, similarly, have purchased fiefs throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean. (The difference between yesterday and today is the difference
between Grenada and St. Kitts. Fifteen years ago, the United States invaded a
Caribbean island to get rid of a Communist government we didn't like.
Today, we could invade a Caribbean island to get rid of a drug dealer we
don't like. This is government privatization, twisted beyond recognition.)
This
anarchy has so far limited itself to marginal countries--Afghanistan, Sudan,
Sierra Leone, etc.--but soon, warns Kaplan, a major nation like Pakistan will
collapse. And when that happens, who knows what nutters will emerge? "Pakistan
has 100 million people. So if it goes, there will be a lot of crazy lunatics
loose," says Kaplan.
There is another, more artificial, reason why America is
increasingly challenged by Bond villains: We create them. The American public
generally yawns at the rest of the world. The tried and true method for ginning
up excitement about a foreign entanglement is to demonize, to focus on a single
foreign scoundrel. We battle Saddam Hussein, not Iraq; Muammar Qaddafi, not
Libya; Manuel Noriega, not Panama. Similarly, it's easier to pin America's drug
problem on Pablo Escobar or to blame global terrorism on a single nefarious
puppeteer such as Bin Laden. (It was astonishing how rapidly Bin Laden emerged
as America's most hated man. One day, a few State Department operatives knew
his name. The next day, we all did, and we were mad as hell at him.)
Demonization creates a
dilemma for American foreign policy makers. The best way to generate popular
support is to personalize the fight. And yet U.S. policy forbids America from
actually trying to assassinate the chosen villain. Here is the heart of the
dilemma of Bondification. We know how James Bond neutralizes Bond villains, but
how does a great power do it? The cruise missile strike against Bin Laden
eerily mirrored the latest Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies , which opens
with a cruise missile strike against a terrorist gathering in Central Asia. But
you can't rely on Bond tactics forever. We bombed Bin Laden once. Can we keep
doing it? Is it acceptable to pluck "Little Nut" Miller off St. Kitts? Or does
that violate the island's sovereignty? These are questions to which we don't
know the answer.
More worrisome is that the
rise of Bond villains encourages Americans to mistake the enemy for the issue.
American and Colombian drug warriors concentrated obsessively on destroying the
wicked Escobar and his Medellín cartel. But while they pursued Escobar, the
cocaine market opened for the Cali cartel. Enemy eliminated, but problem
intact. Bin Laden is a fearsome enemy of the United States, and the sooner he's
killed the better. But even if he dropped dead today, there would still be
millions of underemployed, undereducated, alienated men in the Middle East
ready to follow a charismatic, militant, anti-American leader. In a Bond movie,
when 007 kills the archenemy, the crisis disappears. In the real world, it may
not.
