Brent Scowcroft: America’s wise counsel in an era of strategic upheaval

Scowcroft, a lieutenant general in the air force, was widely regarded as a calm, sober, judicious, loyal and highly intelligent presidential counsellor, who was one of the most successful US foreign policy figures of the post-World War II era.

He was also something of a rare exception in a town like Washington: he lacked the insatiable drive toward power and celebrity. Not for him the media cravings of a Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brezinski, other prominent national security advisers who served Republican and Democratic presidents respectively.

During the Bush Sr administration, Scowcroft’s positions on Russia, China and Iraq attracted criticism from both liberals and conservatives in congress and the media. However, they represented sound statecraft and were ultimately vindicated.

Take Russia. With the collapse of Soviet communism and end of the Cold War (1989-91), Scowcroft orchestrated the strategic arms limitations talks with Moscow. Crucially, he rejected triumphalism in favour of caution.

Far from maximising Washington’s advantage, he was focused on managing the collapse of an empire lest it unleash the kind of instability, chaos and bloodshed usually associated with the fall of empires.

That is why Scowcroft helped persuade USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe and to bring a reunified Germany into the Atlantic alliance.

It is also why he did not push for NATO expansion in the 1990s, lest it upset the strategic sensibilities of a nuclear great power.

A month after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Bush secretly dispatched Scowcroft to Beijing to maintain official contact with a Chinese leadership slipping into dangerous isolation. At the time, Bush and Scowcroft were slammed for coddling “the butchers of Beijing”, as Bill Clinton later charged. In reality, “it was an act of courageous statesmanship”, as Democrat China adviser Michel Oksenberg remarked when the meeting was revealed later that December.

Although Democrats and many Republicans appeared willing to risk isolating Beijing and to court its animosity, Scowcroft was salvaging a constructive relationship with the most populous nation on Earth.

As a result, he prevented a situation that could have easily become worse: a more oppressive China at home and a troublesome China abroad.

Scowcroft was widely lauded for insisting that the US-led coalition force Iraq out of Kuwait in 1990-91. According to The Economist, the Gulf War was “Mr Scowcroft’s finest hour”. However, he was criticised for not “going to Baghdad” to “finish the job” of bringing down Saddam after the liberation of Kuwait.

From neo-conservatives to (of all people) Paul Keating, the decision to leave Saddam in power was derided as a cowardly act that would only defer the problem. In September 1994, after the Iraqi dictator defied a post-Gulf War UN resolution, the Australian Labor prime minister remarked: “I think the great pity is that we never went after Saddam Hussein in the first place. When we had him beat, we should have finished him off.”

However, Scowcroft always made it clear the objective of the Gulf War in 1991 was limited to Kuwait’s liberation. Regime change in Baghdad, he warned in a book co-written with Bush Sr, A World Transformed (1998), was always fraught with the danger of unintended consequences “in a bitterly hostile land”.

That sense of restraint and prudence formed Scowcroft’s thinking in the lead-up to the second Iraq war 12 years later, which Keating’s successor John Howard strongly supported. In a famous Wall Street Journal op-ed in August 2002 titled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” (reprinted in these pages), Scowcroft once again warned of the dire consequences of invading Iraq.

Toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime, he argued, would be “very expensive” and have “very serious” and “bloody” consequences. Saddam, he argued, was a “power-hungry survivor”, who had little cause to join al-Qaeda and he could be contained just like other rogue states.

He cautioned that a campaign against Iraq would “swell the ranks of the terrorists” and “might destabilise Arab regimes in the region”.

Scowcroft copped criticism for speaking out against a war prosecuted by his best friend’s son (George W Bush), former colleagues (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumseld) and understudies (Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley). His warnings were prescient, the Iraq invasion an unmitigated disaster.

Which brings us to what distinguishes Scowcroft from other leading US foreign policy figures in the modern era: his realism.

According to foreign policy realists, and contrary to the liberal interventionists on the left as well as the neoconservatives on the right, America is not destined to transform the world in its special image of democracy and freedom, but should instead be guided by national strategic and economic interests, pursued with a pragmatic calculation of commitments and resources.

Its goal should be to secure peace and stability through maintaining a balance of power among potential adversaries.

In the post-Cold War era, Scowcroft stressed the importance of allies, the danger of hubris, illusions of omnipotence and the wisdom of prudence, limits, restraint and modesty in a world that does not conform to American expectations.

As his former colleague and understudy, Richard Haass, has remarked, Scowcroft’s passing “is a reminder of how far the United States has come – and, in some ways, fallen – since the early 1990s”.