Three secretaries of state from the Nixon, Reagan and Bill Clinton eras painted a dark picture of global security during a rare appearance on Capitol Hill Thursday, saying international order has eroded more during the 15 years than at any time since World War II — with burgeoning threats posed by Iran, Russia and jihadi terrorists leading the charge.
However, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and George Shultz, who testified together before the Senate Armed Services Committee, also all agreed the U.S. remains — even amid the rise of such rivals as China — the world’s most influential and powerful nation with a great responsibility to lead in the 21st century.
“For all the turmoil this young century has brought, America remains, by far, the world’s mightiest economic and military power with a resurgent economy and an energy revolution,” said Mrs. Albright, who served under Mr. Clinton during the late-1990s. “We are the only nation with not just the capacity and will to lead, but also the ideals to do so in a direction that most of the world would prefer to go towards liberty, justice, peace and economic opportunity for all.”
The 77-year-old blamed “globalization and technology” for “reshaping and disrupting the international system” more than anything else. She asserted that technological advances have “unleashed, unprecedented innovation and benefited people the world over,” but are “also amplifying their frustrations and empowering networks of criminals and terrorists.”
It’s a situation that finds the U.S. facing a “more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the second World War,” said Mr. Kissinger, 91, who served in Richard Nixon’s administration during the 1970s.
“For the first time in history, every region now interacts in real time and affects each other simultaneously,” he said.
“The problem of peace was historically posed by the accumulation of power — the emergence of a potentially dominant country threatening the security of its neighbors,” the 91-year-old former secretary of state said. “In our period, peace is often threatened by the disintegration of power; the collapse of authority into non-governed spaces, spreading violence beyond their borders and their regions.”
“This has led to the broadening of the challenge of terrorism, from a threat organized essentially from beyond borders to a threat with domestic networks and origins in many countries of the world,” said Mr. Kissinger, who asserted that “American military power has and will continue to play an eventful role in upholding a favorable international balance, restraining, destabilizing rivalries and providing a field for economic growth and international trade to follow.”
Thursday’s hearing was the third in a series held by senators during recent months with the goal of tapping the perspective of former senior officials for guidance on what the nation’s big-picture foreign policy and strategy goals should be. Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and the Armed Services Committee’s chairman, said the testimony is vital at a time when U.S. foreign policy has become is “reactive” during the Obama years — and at a time of fierce budget battles surrounding threats of sequestration.
“We need to repeal sequestration, we should not withdraw from Afghanistan on an arbitrary calender-based timeline,” said Mr. McCain, adding that Washington needs to develop a “strategy that matches military means” to President Obama’s “stated goal of degrading and destroying ISIS.”
While Mrs. Albright and Mr. Kissinger appeared to actively avoid leveling any direct political criticism at the Obama administration, Mr. Kissinger said the U.S. “should have a strategy-driven budget, not a budget-driven strategy — and in that context, attention must be given to the modernization of our strategic forces.”
Mr. Shultz appeared to generally agree, although his comments could be read as perhaps more critical of the current White House. The 95-year-old, who served under President Reagan during the 1980s, suggested the Obama administration has not done enough to confront the ongoing rise and of Islamic extremist terrorism during the past several years.
“The magnitude of a threat posed by terrorism is so great that we cannot afford to confront it with halfhearted and poorly organized measures,” he said. “Terrorism is a contagious disease that will, inevitably spread if it goes untreated. We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond. But we to be ready to respond.”
With those comments as a backdrop, all three former secretaries of state said Congress and the Obama administration have essentially failed to have a sufficient debate over the current U.S.-led military action against the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS and ISIL in Syria and Iraq.
The administration has justified the creation of the current anti-ISIS campaign by citing authorizations for the use of U.S. military force that were passed by congress well before the current set of circumstances emerged in the Middle East.
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