The Audacity of Hope

sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of
the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.
Obtaining global buy-in also allows the United States to carry a lighter load when
military action is required and enhances the chances for success. Given the
comparatively modest defense budgets of most of our allies, sharing the military burden
may in some cases prove a bit of an illusion, but in the Balkans and Afghanistan, our
NATO partners have indeed shouldered their share of the risks and costs. Additionally,
for the types of conflicts in which we’re most likely to find ourselves engaged, the
initial military operation will often be less complex and costly than the work that
follows—training local police forces, restoring electricity and water services, building a
working judicial system, fostering an independent media, setting up a public health
infrastructure, and planning elections. Allies can help pay the freight and provide
expertise for these critical efforts, as they have in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but they
are far more likely to do so if our actions have gained international support on the front
end. In military parlance, legitimacy is a “force multiplier.”
Just as important, the painstaking process of building coalitions forces us to listen to
other points of view and therefore look before we leap. When we’re not defending
ourselves against a direct and imminent threat, we will often have the benefit of time;
our military power becomes just one tool among many (albeit an extraordinarily
important one) to influence events and advance our interests in the world—interests in
maintaining access to key energy sources, keeping financial markets stable, seeing
international boundaries respected, and preventing genocide. In pursuit of those
interests, we should be engaging in some hardheaded analysis of the costs and benefits
of the use of force compared to the other tools of influence at our disposal.
Is cheap oil worth the costs—in blood and treasure—of war? Will our military
intervention in a particular ethnic dispute lead to a permanent political settlement or an
indefinite commitment of U.S. forces? Can our dispute with a country be settled
diplomatically or through a coordinated series of sanctions? If we hope to win the
broader battle of ideas, then world opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it
may be frustrating at times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that
enjoy the blanket of our protection, or to hear speeches in the UN General Assembly
designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse inaction, it’s just possible that beneath all the
rhetoric are perspectives that can illuminate the situation and help us make better
strategic decisions.
Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the difficult,
methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting the terrorists’ capacity
to inflict harm. That work includes shutting down terrorist financial networks and
sharing intelligence to hunt down terrorist suspects and infiltrate their cells; our
continued failure to effectively coordinate intelligence gathering even among various
U.S. agencies, as well as our continued lack of effective human intelligence capacity, is
inexcusable. Most important, we need to join forces to keep weapons of mass
destruction out of terrorist hands.
One of the best examples of such collaboration was pioneered in the nineties by
Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn
of Georgia, two men who understood the need to nurture coalitions before crises strike,