10.6092/issn.2611-2752/7156
The article analyzes Stanley Hoffmann's view on US foreign policy in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and especially on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It is based on his books, including his earlier ones, Gulliver's Troubles, Janus and Minerva, and Duties Beyond Borders, and on the essays he published in the New York Review of Books from 2001 until 2006. Hoffmann’s analysis represents a powerful example of how “unfinished” the debate on American foreign policy is and will probably always be.
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Alice Ciulla
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September 11
After Iraq: Stanley Hoffmann and the Role of the United States in the International System
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Alice Ciulla
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After Iraq: Stanley Hoffmann and the Role of the United States in the International System
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/7156                                                              ISSN 2611-2752




 After Iraq: Stanley Hoffmann and the Role of the United States
                                  in the International System

                                                    Alice Ciulla

                    Submitted: July 13, 2017 – Accepted: February 6, 2018 – Published: March 1, 2018



                                                       Abstract

       The article analyzes Stanley Hoffmann’s view on US foreign policy in the aftermath of September
       11, 2001, and especially on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It is based
       on his books, including his earlier ones, Gulliver’s Troubles, Janus and Minerva, and Duties Beyond
       Borders, and on the essays he published in the New York Review of Books from 2001 until 2006.
       Hoffmann’s analysis represents a powerful example of how “unfinished” the debate on American
       foreign policy is and will probably always be.
       Keywords: Stanley Hoffmann; Iraq; September 11




Alice Ciulla: Università Roma 3 (Italia)
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3726-4603
Contact: alice.ciulla@uniroma3.it
Alice Ciulla is a PhD candidate in European and International Studies at Roma Tre University. Her dissertation
focuses on the U.S. intellectual debate on the Italian Communist Party (1964-1980).



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1 World Disorder and International Terrorism: the Aftermath of
     September 11
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and United
Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, represented both the cause and
the symptom of a trembling world order. They also dramatically changed the US administration’s
approach to foreign policy, shifting it from what can be described as “minimal unilateralism” to “max-
imalist unilateralism.”1 Some of the members of the then-ruling Bush administration advocated the
need for a military effort to fight the “war on terror,” which eventually translated into the launch of
the war against Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).
     In the long run, the consequences of the attacks led to neither a redefinition of the international or-
der nor the definitive affirmation of a new American exceptionalism.2 Nonetheless, the shock suffered
by the US and the enduring perception of a terrorist threat forced the nation to rethink and redefine
its role in the world arena,3 stimulating international relations experts to refine their analyses.
     September 11 raised many questions, but the most urgent one to answer was what reaction would
be the most appropriate. Later in 2001, President Bush chose to declare war against the country said
to be responsible for training, financing, and giving shelter to terrorist groups: Afghanistan. Iraq, of-
ficially attacked for detaining forbidden weapons of mass destruction, was invaded two years later.
While the intervention in Afghanistan was generally supported on both a national and international
level, the path that led to war against Iraq was much more controversial and debated. Journalists,
scholars, politicians, experts, and public opinion all over the world joined a huge discussion that fo-
cused on the very legitimacy of the intervention, which ultimately proved to be a strategic failure for
regional (and world) stability.
     It goes beyond the scope of this article to provide an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the
opinions that emerged from the debate. The smaller goal here is to shed light on the contribution of
one of its voices, that of Stanley Hoffmann, a great intellectual, a “scholar-teacher”4 who immediately
spoke out against the conflict. Nonetheless, a very brief overview of the discussion is necessary to this
goal.
     The invasion of Iraq was not a self-evident consequence of September 11. That decision was in-
spired by a group of intellectuals and policy makers, the so-called neoconservatives, whose ideas suc-
ceeded in obtaining the support of the president, Congress, and—at least in the initial phase— public
opinion.5 Neocons had been advocating a strategy to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime since the
1990s. Their campaign, battled through articles and books, eventually scored a point on October 31,
1998, when the US Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton (1996–2001) signed the Iraq Libera-
tion Act. The Act did not have immediate consequences, so much so that the Iraqi regime change
was not even a priority when the Bush Jr. administration took office. Nonetheless, when September
11 occurred, neoconservatives had the opportunity to revitalize their ideas and elaborate a compre-
hensive and aggressive strategy of “war on terror.”6 They were not the only supporters of this ap-


1
    See Mario Del Pero, “Present at the Destruction? George Bush, the Neoconservatives and the Traditions of U.S. Foreign
    Policy,” RSA Journal, Vol. 13, (2005): 81–106.
2
    See John G. Ikenberry, Liberal Hegemony and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006) and Joseph Nye, The Paradox
    of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go it Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3
    See Raffaella Baritono and Elisabetta Vezzosi, eds., Oltre il secolo americano? Gli Stati Uniti prima e dopo l’11 settembre (Roma:
    Carocci, 2011).
4
    James Shield, “Stanley Hoffmann: A Political Life,” French Politics, 7:3/4 (September 1, 2009): 363.
5
    Neoconservatives were not the majority of the Bush cabinet members. On the contrary, realists like Colin Powell and
    Condoleeza Rice were in much more influential positions. See Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound.
    The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans Rise of the
    Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (London: Viking, 2004); Max Boot, “George W. Bush: The ‘W’ Stands for Woodrow,”
    The Wall Street Journal ( July 1, 2002), reprinted in Justin Vaïsse and Pierre Hassner, Washington et le monde. Dilemme d’une
    superpuissance (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2003), 30–2.
6
    Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism. The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 249–50. On neo-
    conservatives, see also Mario Del Pero, Henry Kissinger e l’ascesa dei neoconservatori. Alle origini della politica estera americana



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proach, as the so-called neoliberals, or “liberal hawks,” stood with them in backing the necessity of war
against Saddam’s regime. Paul Berman, member of the editorial board of Dissent magazine, published
the book Terror and Liberalism about Islamist and Ba’athist ideologies.7 George Packer published The
Fight Is for Democracy, arguing that Islamism was a new version of twentieth-century totalitarianisms.8
Christopher Hitchens, a former Socialist, joined several public debates defending the war against “Is-
lamofascism”: in 2005 he reiterated why the fall of Saddam’s regime was a successful, and inevitable,
initiative.9 Their argument drew on liberal-humanitarian grounds. Overthrowing Saddam’s regime
was a necessary step towards achieving the American mission in the world, which included exporting
democracy and defending liberal values whenever and wherever they were under attack.
    Opponents to the war were also a composite group. Along with the large-scale mobilization of
public opinion, politicians, diplomats, military commanders, and intellectuals also spoke out against
the war.10 Left-wing intellectuals who opposed US intervention included renowned public figures such
as Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and the editor of the New Left Review, the British-Pakistani journalist
Tariq Ali.11 A number of liberals also raised concerns about the legitimacy and the potentially negative
consequences of Bush’s “war on terror”: one of them was Stanley Hoffmann.
    Born in Vienna in 1928, he acquired French citizenship in 1947. He taught at the Institut d’Etudes
Politiques in Paris and at Harvard University in the US, where he cofounded the Center for Euro-
pean Studies in 1968. Unlike his “class of 1953” colleagues, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and
Samuel Huntington, Hoffmann never had a political role, either as a protagonist or as an adviser. This
peculiar position allowed him to freely criticize the policies adopted by the various US administrations
in office during his lifetime.
    Politically a Gaullist, he was close to the American liberal culture, but he also studied, admired,
and criticized the thought of realists such as Hans Morgenthau and especially Raymond Aron.12
    This passage, an excerpt from one of the essays collected in the book Janus and Minerva: Essays
in Theory and Practice of International Relations, can help explain his view on the discipline: “When I
came in this country [the United States] as a student, I discovered not only an effort to turn the study
of international affairs into a discipline, detached from the traditional approaches of international
law and diplomatic history, but also a noisy battle between ‘realists’ and ‘idealists.’ ”13 He thought
that both fronts were right on some points: realists were correct in stressing the basic anarchy of the
international system, while idealists were right in rejecting the idea of the conflicting nature of the
relationship between states. Hoffmann thought of himself as part of a group inspired by the myth of
Sisyphus14 and looked for ways to fit liberal values into a system that (as realists said) tended towards
destruction and chaos.15


     (Bari-Roma: Laterza, 2005).
7
     Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
8
     George Packerm, ed., The Fight is For Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (New York: Harper Peren-
     nial, 2003).
9
     Christopher Hitchens, “The Case for Regime Change,” in A Matter of Principle. Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, ed.
     Thomas Cushman (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 30. See also Mary Ryan, “Intellectuals and the War
     on Terror,” Journal of American Studies, 44:1 (February 2010): 203–9; Tony Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” London Review of
     Books, 28:18 (September 2006) and George Packer, “The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq,” New York Times Magazine (December
     8, 2002).
10
     Thomas E. Rick, “Some Top Military Brass Favor Status Quo in Iraq,” Washington Post ( July 28, 2002), accessed October 11,
     2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10749-2002Jul27.html.
11
     See Milan Rai and Noam Chomsky, War Plan Iraq. Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London: Verso, 2002) and “Tariq Ali
     vs. Christopher Hitchens on the Occupation of Iraq: Postponed Liberation or Recolonisation?,” Democracy Now (December 4,
     2003), accessed October 11, 2017, https://www.democracynow.org/2003/12/4/tariq_ali_vs_christopher_hitchens_on and
     Gore Vidal, Dreaming War. Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta (New York: Nation Books, 2003).
12
     For a short biography see Martin Griffiths, Fifty Thinkers in International Relations (London: Routledge, 1999), 85–9.
13
     Stanley Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva. Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Relations (Boulder: Westview Press,
     1987), 394.
14
     Hoffmann was an admirer of Albert Camus, whom he often quotes.
15
     Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva, 395.



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    His intellectual production is complex and intriguing. As Martin Griffiths wrote, some of Hoff-
mann’s volumes “are required reading for any serious student of international relations.”16
    A European intellectual who moved to the United States, Hoffmann commented, discussed, and
criticized the Bush Jr. administration’s decisions and became one of the most distinguished voices in
a debate that involved many observers on both sides of the Atlantic. His analysis on the war in Iraq of
2003 testifies to the extent to which that war affected the intellectual community. At the same time,
his views suggest that he was redefining the “lens” he had used to look at the world until then. In
such a reappraisal, he certainly provided numerous insights into the general theory of international
relations.
    This article aims at contributing—without claiming to be exhaustive—to the study of Hoffmann’s
thought, strangely little known to the European public outside France. It will be limited to his analyses
of the global effects of the September 11 attacks and the decision of the Bush administration to bring
the US to war against Iraq. What new scenario did that war open? Which role should the American
superpower play in a world characterized by disorder and chaos? Which alternatives did the United
States have to maintain its position as guarantor of the international system?
    Hoffmann’s answers to these questions provide a powerful and convincing example of how “un-
finished” the debate on American foreign policy is bound to be. Contemporary commentators of
events will always be divided into supporters and critics of the administrations’ choices, political sci-
entists will try to explain and sometimes influence them, and historians will underscore the changes
and continuities of political decisions. If this is generally true, it becomes particularly evident when
it comes to deciding whether or not to bring the country to war. In the case of Iraq, the consequences
of the conflict are still being debated today, so much so that they even became one of the matters of
discussion during the 2016 presidential campaign.
    As time went by, many regretted their support of the war and others their weakness in opposing it,
including The New York Times, famously regretting that “a number of instances of coverage … was not
as rigorous as it should have been.”17
    Hoffmann certainly did not have the same influence on public opinion as The Times did, nor was he
the most famous public intellectual in the United States during the debate on Iraq, but he did oppose
the war from the very beginning. Leaning on liberal traditional grounds, he advocated that the most
effective response to terrorism would be a multilateral operation put in place by means of police and
intelligence, and that it would involve the United Nations.



2 Reﬂections on the “War on Terror”: A “Clash of Globalizations”?
Stanley Hoffman published the article entitled “The US at War” in The New York Review of Books in the
November 1, 2001 issue, referring to the “war on terror” launched by Bush during his discourse in
front of a joint session of Congress on September 20. The article was written on October 3, before the
operations in Afghanistan began. Ultimately, Hoffmann wrote, the attacks demonstrated that “a small
number of well-organized conspirators could cause thousands of victims in the territory of the ‘only
superpower.’ ”18 He was certainly not the only one to notice it. Nonetheless, he offered an original
interpretation of the “well-organized conspirators” features. While Bush did not hesitate to describe
the events as a “clash of civilizations,”19 borrowing the concept from Samuel Huntington’s famous
book, Hoffmann had a different interpretation.
    He had often underscored the importance for international relation experts to shift the focus from
the international system to its single parts and from state to non-state actors.20 In World Disorders, he


16
     Ibid., 88.
17
     From the editors: “The Times and Iraq,” The New York Times (May 26, 2004).
18
     Stanley Hoffmann, “On the War,” The New York Review of Books, XLVIII:17 (November 1, 2001):5.
19
     George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror,” September 11, 2006, The American Presidency Project,
     accessed October 13, 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=73962.
20
     Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva, 124.



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maintained that international balances and unbalances are determined by a variety of actors, including
private groups and individuals.21 He also warned that, despite the triumphalist pictures that emerged
at the end of the Cold War, history was demonstrating that the collapse of the Soviet bloc did not lead
the international system towards a liberal, unipolar, tension-free order in which a unique paradigm
of modernization triumphed and remained unchallenged.22
     The opposite was true: the emergence of new states, previously members of the Eastern Bloc,
and growing economic interdependence not only led to a barely manageable diffusion of power, but
also reignited ethnic conflicts within the single nations, potentially menacing global stability. Despite
drawing attention to non-state actors and the dangers caused by the diffusion of power, Hoffmann
never explicitly mentioned the creation of a “network of terror” as the most challenging problem to
the international order before September 11. This is not to say that his analysis was misplaced or in-
coherent. When the attacks occurred, he extensively investigated the phenomenon of transnational
terrorism, and he proposed to take action on its causes in a comprehensive but perhaps overly ideal-
istic way. Dealing with one problem, he thought in other words, could not lead to forgetting another
one.
     One year after the attacks took place, in 2002 the Harvard political scientist offered his explanation
of events in Foreign Affairs. September 11, he pointed out, shed light on the dual nature of international
civil society. Along with positive effects, the “democratization” of means of communication also led to
negative consequences. “Globalization makes an awful form of violence easily accessible to hopeless
fanatics. Terrorism is the bloody link between interstate relations and global security.”23 According to
Hoffmann, then, international terrorism could be interpreted as a negative consequence of globaliza-
tion, a point raised in different ways by other scholars.24 In his view, there were three different levels
of globalization, each one with its critical issues: the first level was that of economic globalization, the
main actors of which were firms, investors, banks and (partly) states, and international organizations.
Economic globalization led to the overdeveloped kind of capitalism “ironically foreseen by Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels [which] poses a central dilemma between efficiency and fairness.”25 Then, there
was the cultural level of globalization, often identified with the process of Americanization, which re-
sulted from the technological revolution and economic interdependence. Last, there was the political
level of globalization, which was a product of the other two. It consisted in the global influence of
American decisions on the rest of the world, and in the creation of international and regional insti-
tutions to solve global crises. The political dimension of globalization raised two problems: decision
makers often lacked “democratic accountability,” and supranational organizations, like the United Na-
tions, were too weak and too slow to be effective.
     Hoffmann stressed that the three levels of globalization had the common effect of creating or
increasing inequality among peoples. He highlighted that those who remained excluded from the
benefits of the world system could ultimately take refuge in the ideological and fundamentalist roots
of their culture, eventually joining terrorist groups.26
     After September 11, the most urgent political dilemma was how to deal with transnational terror-


21
     Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders. Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era (Lanham: Rowman and. Littlefield, 1998). See
     also Carlo M. Santoro, Introduction to Il dilemma americano: la politica estera degli USA dalla guerra fredda alle sfide degli anni
     ’80, by Stanley Hoffmann (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1978).
22
     Such was the famous interpretation offered by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free
     Press, 1992).
23
     Stanley Hoffmann, “Clash of Globalizations,” Foreign Affairs, 81 (2002): 104; see also Joseph Nye, “U.S. Power and Strategy
     after Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, 82, (2003).
24
     For two different aspects of globalization, see for example Nial Ferguson, Clashing Civilizations or Mad Mullahs: the United
     States Between Informal and Formal Empire, in The Age of Terror. America and the World After September 11, eds. Strobe Talbott and
     Nayan Chanda (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001), 115–41; and Odd Arne Westad, Faulty Learning and Flawed Policy in Afghanistan
     and Iraq, in In Uncertain Times : American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11 , eds. Melvin P. Leffler and Jeffrey W.
     Legro (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 150–62. Ferguson focuses on the economic effect of globalization within
     states, while Westad draws attention on the disparity between world’s regions.
25
     Hoffmann, “Clash of Globalizations,” 107.
26
     Ibid., 112.



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ism. The traditional ways to attack and defend the integrity of the states could be ineffective or even
worsen the already chaotic state of world affairs. On one side, a traditional war against a non-state
actor could have unexpected consequences. On the other, defensive countermeasures at a domestic
level, consisting in reducing people’s mobility and slowing down financial flows, risked boosting in-
equalities and creating further conditions for radical ideologies. An adequate response to terrorism
was therefore neither an easy nor a fast task. It implied an active and responsible role of the US, a long-
term strategy for resolving the Middle-Eastern conflict and lowering the costs of globalization. It also
implied that the US should seek multilateral cooperation, leaving behind nationalist beliefs. American
policy makers were warned, “Washington has yet to understand that nothing is more dangerous for a
hyper-power than the temptation of unilateralism.”27



3 Towards War in Iraq: A Renewed Exceptionalism
On September 14, the US Congress passed a law that authorized the use of force against states that
supported Al Qaeda terrorist network. The first target of the United States was Afghanistan, where the
Taliban had their training camps. The military operations started on October 7, with the help of the
United Kingdom. The operation soon obtained the formal authorization of both the UN and NATO.
    The war against Iraq was declared in a very different legal framework, as the US Senate approved
the military intervention in the country, with a majority of seventy-seven senators out of one hundred,
but the UN did not give the US government the support it was looking for.28
    The Bush administration responded to terrorism with the doctrine delineated in a document, the
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in September 2002. The novelty
of the “Bush doctrine” was the theoretical justification of “preemptive war.”29 “We must be prepared
to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten us or use weapons of
mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.”30
    According to Hoffmann, the document expressed the tendency towards a renewed exceptionalism
that was spreading both within the intellectual and the political community.
    In the volume Chaos and Violence, he thus analyzed the roots of contemporary hyper-nationalist
trends in US foreign policy. While the Republican president was inclined towards unilateralism even
before September, 11 (as suggested by the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and
the refusal to accept the International Criminal Court), the attacks on US soil provided the justification
to relaunch a comprehensively unilateral political strategy. As previously recalled, that strategy was
based on the ideas of a group of thinkers, whom Hoffmann labeled neo-exceptionalists and divided
into three groups, namely, “the sheriffs who see the world through the epic of High Noon with the eyes
of Carl Schmitt,” the cold-warriors who accused Kissinger of being too moderate; the imperialists who
thought that the United States was morally legitimized to act in the world according to its models; and
those who were mainly concerned with the effects of Washington’s policies on Israel’s interests: among
them were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith.31
    These three groups concurred in the elaboration of the National Security Strategy of 2002 (NSS
2002), which defended the notion of preemptive war, according to which, the (supposed) fact that
the regime of Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was enough to declare war
against Iraq for the purpose of overthrowing his regime. Vaguely inspired by a “Wilsonianism in
boots,”32 as Pierre Hassner defined it, and characterized by moralizing and imperial tones, application


27
     Ibid., 113.
28
     Mario Del Pero, La politica estera prima e dopo l’11 settembre, in Oltre il secolo americano, eds. Baritono and Vezzosi, 113–15.
29
     On Bush’s interpretation of “preemptive war” see Tony Judt, “The Way We Live Now,” The New York Review of Books (March
     27, 2003).
30
     U.S. National Security Strategy 2002, 16, accessed June 4, 2017, https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf.
31
     Hoffmann, Chaos and Violence, 121.
32
     Pierre Hassner, “The United States: The Empire of Force or the Force of Empire?,” Chaillot Papers, 54 (September 2002):
     43.



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of the NSS 2002 would face two main obstacles in Hoffmann’s opinion: “one is the world itself, and
the other one is US public.”33
    The first obstacle, “the world itself,” represents a recurrent theme of Hoffmann’s intellectual pro-
duction, i.e., experts and policy makers should examine things the way they are, not the way they want
them to be.34
    The American public would prove to be an obstacle for Washington’s foreign policy only a few
years later. In 2008, according to polls, 54% of adults thought that the intervention in Iraq was wrong
and only 36% of the people interviewed thought that the war was the right decision.35 Generally speak-
ing, the opinion of the American people on the Iraqi conflict seems to have changed from 2005, as
the polling institute Gallup underscored.36 Initially, 72% of Americans supported President Bush’s
actions.37
    Why did US public opinion support the war in 2003? Responding to the French historian Frédéric
Bozo, Hoffmann pointed out that Bush had been good at “selling the war” as the right choice to liberate
the Iraqi people and as a necessary way to defend American national interests. He also added a harsh
critique of American journalists, who, in his view, fully and uncritically joined the war rhetoric. “In
the United States supporting the troops meant supporting the war.”38 This is not entirely true, as
Hoffmann himself admitted later on, noting that there were some critical voices who spoke against
the war, but they were too isolated and too weak.39



4     Was Intervention Right?
The war in Iraq raised severe legal concerns. A firm supporter of international law, Hoffmann thought
that the UN was the main actor in charge of defending world peace and that states could only excep-
tionally act on their own.40 Intervention is legitimate, he thought, when there are “massive violations
of human rights, which would encompass genocide, ethnic cleansing, brutal and large-scale repres-
sion to force a population into submission, including deliberate policies of barbarism, as well as the
kinds of famines, massive breakdowns of law and order, epidemics and flights of refugees that occur
when a failed state collapsed” or when a democratically elected government is fighting against an anti-
democratic rebellion or when a regime is inflicting “mass and systematic suffering” on its people.41
    When Bush announced the military way against Iraq, he commented, “There is no room in the
U.N. Charter for the president’s doctrine of pre-emption, for anticipatory self-defense.”42
    He had written on the notion of “preemptive war” in Duties Beyond Borders, after a long analysis of
the just war theory. “Take the notion that a just war can be a war for self-defense. If it is left as vague
as this, it could easily lead to generalization of preventive or preemptive war (should one argue that
under modern technological conditions, survival requires one to strike before one is attacked), and in


33
     Hoffmann, Chaos and Violence, 124.
34
     Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles, Or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
35
     “Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 2003-2008,” March 19, 2008, accessed June 10, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.
     org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/.
36
     Frank Newport, “American Public Opinion and Iraq,” December 19, 2011, accessed June 10, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/
     opinion/polling-matters/169370/american-public-opinion-iraq.aspx.
37
     Frank Newport, “Seventy-Two Percent of Americans Support War Against Iraq,” March 24, 2003, accessed June 10, 2017,
     http://www.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx.
38
     Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound. America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004),
     79.
39
     For one analysis of the role of US media in leading the country to war against Iraq, see also William A. Dorman, “A Debate
     Delayed Is a Debate Denied: U.S. News Media before the 2003 War with Iraq,” in Leading to the 2003 Iraq War: The Global
     Media Debate, ed. Alexander G. Nikolaev (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 11–22.
40
     Hoffmann, “Politics,” 168.
41
     Ibid., 162–3.
42
     Hoffmann quoted in David E. Sanger, “A New Doctrine for War,” The New York Times (March 18, 2003).



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fact to a generalization of war altogether, because it does not tell you against what self-defense is just—
against an armed attack? A seizure of hostages? An expropriation of enterprises? The mistreatment
of one’s nationals?”43
    According to Hoffmann, if we limited the problem to the supposed detention of weapons of mass
destruction by an illiberal regime, we could probably argue that the cause to war, in the case of Iraq,
was legitimate; the fact that systematic diplomatic action would have been unsuccessful remained
unproven in any case. Concerning the proportionality and effectiveness of the means used, the doubts
that many had raised were legitimate. Indeed, the number of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians caused
by the intervention was not declared for a long time.44
    Lastly, the US acted with the lack of an international mandate, something that Hoffmann con-
sidered unjustifiable. The Bush administration conducted the war with a “coalition of the willing,”45 a
group of nations that joined the US in the conflict, without formal authorization of the UN and NATO,
a decision that deeply affected America’s relations with its allies.



5     Transatlantic Relations after Iraq
On September 13, 2001, the daily French newspaper Le Monde published an op-ed article entitled
“Nous sommes tous américains.”46 The author, Jean-Marie Colombani, expressed a feeling of soli-
darity toward the American people widely and genuinely shared by European public opinion. Such
solidarity was translated at a diplomatic level as well, when, for the first time in history, the countries
of the European Union invoked Article 5 of the NATO Charter, raising the mutual defense clause.
The invasion of Afghanistan, the first American response to the attacks, was therefore conducted with
the unanimous support of European governments. There were, of course, critics of the war against
Afghanistan, and European public opinion did not side entirely with the US in its decision to start a
war.47
    The intervention in Afghanistan, nonetheless, acquired the necessary legal support. On the con-
trary, the decision to invade Iraq was not backed by the UN and was widely criticized throughout
Europe. On September 12, 2002, while speaking in front of the audience of the UN, President Bush,
referring to the Baghdad regime, said, “Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than
patient. We’ve tried sanctions. We’ve tried the carrot of oil for food and the stick of coalition military
strikes…. If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively, to hold Iraq to
account. We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions.”48 The Security
Council responded by adopting Resolution 1441, stating that Iraq was violating previous Resolutions.
When Saddam Hussein refused to respect the clauses of those Resolutions again, the Bush adminis-
tration decided to deploy US troops to the Middle-Eastern country. The main partner of the United
States was the United Kingdom, governed by Prime Minister Tony Blair. The coalition invaded Iraq
on March 19, 2003. On May 1, the mission was declared accomplished.
    Before the war was declared, Hoffmann wrote an article in The New York Review of Books assessing
the results of the first year and a half of the Bush administration. One of the major political mistakes
the US government had made, he wrote, was that it threatened the other countries of proceeding uni-
laterally on Iraq. To pursue its strategy, the US had deliberately divided the NATO alliance “in order


43
     Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics (Syracuse: Syracuse
     University Press, 1981), 49; Hoffmann’s insistence on proportionality in the use of force is strictly linked to the notion of
     “total cold war” in the age of nuclear deterrence.
44
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 68–9.
45
     George W. Bush, Interview With Czech Television (November 12, 2002), The American Presidency Project, accessed July
     11, 2017 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=6.
46
     Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous sommes tous américains,” Le Monde (September 13, 2001), accessed July 11, 2017 http://www.
     lemonde.fr/idees/article/2007/05/23/nous-sommes-tous-americains_913706_3232.html.
47
     See Iosef Joffe, “Collateral Damage,” Time* (March 3, 2003): 33, and Michael Cox, “Commentary: Martians and Venutians
     in the New World Order,” International Affairs, 79:3 (2003):523–32.
48
     Text: “Bush’s Speech to U.N. on Iraq,” The New York Times (September 12, 2002).



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to isolate the French and Germans provoking both countries by asking for NATO military assistance
to Turkey that the Turks themselves had not solicited”49 and the European Union, with the help of
the English prime minister. Bush, according to Hoffmann, had treated the allies like “shoe polish for
American boots.”50 Hoffmann wrote, “This disdain for international institutions, and adoption of a
strategic doctrine that gives a prominent place to preemptive war in violations of the provisions of
the UN Charter, along with the decision to go to war without the support of the Security Council re-
quired by the Charter, are all part of a tough new policy of US predominance whose implications are
extremely serious but remain largely unexamined.”51 Actually, the conflict caused divisions among all
the countries of Europe, even the non-EU members. Spain, Italy, and the countries of Eastern Europe,
soon to be member states of NATO and the EU, supported the intervention. France, Germany, and
Russia (and China) opposed it.
     While governments took different positions on the war, European citizens were unanimously
against it. As Geir Lundestadt underscored, the French and German position on the Iraqi conflict
“had the support of public opinion in virtually every European country, even including Britain … . As
the crisis over Iraq developed in 2003, majorities in most European countries no longer had confi-
dence even in the United States as such.”52
     Being a European student and an expert on French history and politics, Hoffmann devoted a great
part of his reflection on Iraq to the future of transatlantic relations, and particularly on US relations
with France. “American francophobia is an old and complicated phenomenon,” he declared to Bozo,53
perhaps deliberately avoiding the fact that the contrary was also true. France has its own history of
antiamericanism.54
     The 2003 crisis was not the first big crisis between the transatlantic allies. Hoffmann, in any case,
distinguished it from the previous ones. This time, he wrote, there had been no place for negotia-
tions. Americans were defending a vital interest and “any dissidence would be punished.”55 He was
convinced that the US media were partly responsible for the wave of anti-French polemics crossing
the country, and that they often organized a deliberate “well-orchestrated campaign of innuendoes,
distortions, and lies aimed not only at discrediting French arguments but at France herself.”56 Hoff-
mann defended the French government’s reasons for opposing the war: France trusted the reports of
UN inspectors on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was reluctant “to wage a war
for a regime change,” and, having a population of almost six million people of Islamic faith, wanted
to avoid a “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West on its soil.57
     As Hoffmann explained, the reasons for the crisis between the US and the EU laid in the different
views on foreign policy. American policy makers were adopting a dogmatic attitude, while European
governments were acting in a pragmatic way and evaluating the consequences of each step made.
They considered the fight against terrorism much more complicated than the United States presented
it. According to Europeans, there was more than one enemy to destroy and there was more than one
goal to achieve. The risk of misinterpreting the events was too high and could increase the state of
world disorder.58


49
     Stanley Hoffmann, “America Goes Backward,” The New York Review of Books, 1:10 ( June 12, 2003): 74.
50
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 126.
51
     Hoffmann, “America,” 75.
52
     Geir Lundestadt, The United States and Western Europe since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford:
     Oxford University Press, 2003), 276.
53
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 5.
54
     See for instance Jean-François Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine: son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconséquences (Paris: Édi-
     tions Plon, 2002), and Philippe Roger, L’ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
55
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 10.
56
     Stanley Hoffmann, “France, the United States, and Iraq,” The Nation (February 2004), reprinted in Hoffmann, Chaos and
     Violence, 159–60.
57
     Ibid., 161.
58
     Stanley Hoffmann, “U.S.-European Relations: Past and Future,” International Affairs, 79:5 (2003):1029–36.



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    Moreover, European governments had to deal with public opinion, where the vast majority op-
posed the war, and was facing an intense wave of antiamericanism.59
    The crisis was so deep that the most-cited book to interpret the state of transatlantic relations, back
then, was Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, in which the author argues that Europeans and Ameri-
cans have completely different and conflictual worldviews, the former interpreting the international
system in Kantian terms and the latter in Hobbesian ones.60
    After the attacks of September 11, some observers even speculated about the possible end of the
West.61 Yet, what transatlantic partners were experiencing was an institutional crisis that did not affect
their common values; what had changed in the field of international relations was the political role
that the United States and Europe attributed to themselves.62



6 “One Can Only Destroy What One Can Replace”. The End of Conﬂict
The war in Iraq was brief, but its consequences have yet to be fully understood. At the end of the
military operations, the first knot to be untangled was how to get away from the country while guar-
anteeing its stability at the same time.
     The US troops surprisingly lacked any sort of preparation on how to manage the aftermath of
the war. In Hoffmann’s words, it seemed like a “return to the ‘Vietnam syndrome’: once again we
find confused objectives, a misunderstanding of the attitude of the ‘natives’ toward the ‘liberators’,
confrontations between terrorists of mysterious origins and experience and heavy conventional forces.
As in Vietnam, the choice at present is between an ‘undignified’ withdrawal … and an increase in foreign
military forces.”63 Obviously, the last option would pose a number of problems, not least that of being
highly unpopular among Iraqis (and probably worldwide).
     The withdrawal from Iraq had therefore to be progressive and take place only after regular elec-
tions, organized with the supervision of the UN. As time passed, he warned, “[the American troops]
are likely to be caught up in conflicts among political factions, tribal leaders, religious groups, and
ethnic forces eager either to oppose or court the occupiers.”64 As Hoffmann himself recognized later,
his analysis was incorrect. The main consequence of the Iraqi insurrection in the aftermath of the
conflict, mostly organized by Sunnis, was the beginning of a civil war, and not of a clash between
rebels and American troops.
     The war had to end at a diplomatic level as well. It was fundamental to clarify that the “war on
terrorism,” at least by that means, was over, or other regimes could feel legitimized to start conflicts
in its name. Above all, Ariel Sharon could feel free to act in Palestine and Vladimir Putin in Chechnya.
“Withdrawal from Iraq, combined with a new effort by the United States, the United Nations, the
European Union, and Russia to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and to create a livable
Palestinian state, would mark a return to reality, to good sense, and to a moral politics.”65 Hoffmann
certainly knew that he was asking too much of any US administration. But the presidential elections
were getting closer, and the time was right to launch insights into the public debate.




59
     For a comprehensive account, see Peter J. Katsenstein and Robert O. Kohane, Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, (Ithaca:
     Cornell University Press, 2006), and Piero Craveri and Gaetano Quagliariello, L’antiamericanismo in Italia e in Europa nel
     secondo dopoguerra (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004).
60
     Robert Kagan, On Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
61
     See Charles A. Kupchan, “The End of the West,” The Atlantic (November 2002).
62
     Federico Romero, “Dalla convergenza alla divaricazione,” in Quale occidente, occidente perché, ed. Tiziano Bonazzi (Soveria
     Mannelli, 2005),189-190. See also Jeffrey J. Anderson, John G. Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse, eds., The End of the West? Crisis
     and Change in the Atlantic Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
63
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 138.
64
     Hoffmann, Chaos and Violence, 172.
65
     Hoffmann, Chaos and Violence, 175.



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7 The Way It Should Be: US Foreign Policy According to Hoffmann
The volume Gulliver’s Troubles or the Setting of American Foreign Policy, published in 1968, is doubtless
Hoffmann’s most complete study of American foreign policy. In it, he described the style of US foreign
policy as a mix of “formulism” and “formalism.”66 By that, he meant that American policy makers,
too focused on theory and pre-assumptions, failed to understand the history and politics of foreign
countries. In Hoffmann’s view, they erroneously tended to apply abstract theories to very different
situations, with the result, in most cases, of causing damage instead of solving problems.
     Later on, in a collection of essays published between 1979 and 1982, he described American foreign
policy as a series of “dead ends.”67 Nothing changed after the Cold War ended. According to Hoffman,
both Republicans and Democrats were convinced that the US had acquired some sort of supremacy
with the end of the Second World War, a supremacy “seen as both a fact of power and a condition of
world security and prosperity.”68
     The hegemonic position of the US was hardly deniable, but it had to be reconsidered in the light of
globalization. In an increasingly interdependent world, American superiority basically coincided with
its military strength. In Hoffmann’s view, that was not enough to maintain superiority. Force could
also be misused, as in the case of Iraq, and undermine America’s credibility. To keep its position as
the linchpin of the international system, the US had to invest in a genuine multilateral policy with
its allies and conduct a “drastic long-term policy of demilitarization carried out in collaboration with
foreign partners,” beginning with the reduction of military expenses. Hoffman wrote, “Our military
budget is more likely to be a provocation than a deterrent to America’s current rivalry with China.”69
     Restoring multilateralism and reducing tensions among states was also essential to increase the
effectiveness of the UN and preserve the world peace. A reform of UN structures was badly needed and
could only be achieved with international cooperation.70 Hoffmann also envisioned the creation of
an association of liberal and democratic states that could exert pressure to take action on the Secretary
General whenever the UN was contrary to or incapable of intervention to stop abuses committed by
illiberal regimes, and provide support and assistance to newly democratized regimes.71
     To face the terrorist threat, it was ultimately necessary to coordinate national police services and
restore an international system of justice to punish individuals responsible for crimes, rather than
states. In the long run, the US would nonetheless have gone back to multilateral management of inter-
national crises, as the nature of challenges left no room for any other option. The imperial vision that
some continued to defend would eventually clash with national sentiment. “The moment will come
when the American people will understand that the values of which they are proud are incompatible
with the practice of empire, which undermines its authority abroad and its institutions…. For an anx-
ious wounded nationalism, the imperial temptation is strong, but it is not inevitable or irreversible.”72



8 Conclusions
Stanley Hoffmann’s analyses of September 11 and the war in Iraq must be distinguished.
   The former implies a look backwards at the causes of terrorism and raises general theoretical
questions. As Robert Keohane emphasized, in fact, Hoffmann thought of theory as a series of questions




66
     Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles, 126.
67
     Stanley Hoffmann, Dead Ends. American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing, 1983).
68
     Stanley Hoffmann, “The Foreign Policy the United States Needs,” The New York Review of Books, LXIII:13 (August 13, 2006):
     62.
69
     Hoffmann, “The Foreign Policy,” 63; on the US’s use of military strength and rhetoric, see also Andrew J. Bacevich, The New
     American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
70
     Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound, 118.
71
     Ibid., 121–2.
72
     Ibid., 146.



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applied to history.73 Hoffmann’s explanation of terrorism involved political balances in the Middle
East and the effects of globalization. Answering Bush’s famous question—“Why do they hate us?”—
Hoffmann pointed out that the supposed “envy” of democratic values and respect for individual rights
present in the US was not a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, if democracy were the goal of all the
individuals on earth, it would be very easy to build democratic regimes in every corner of the world.
    In my opinion, the arguments he raised are extremely important for developing a comprehensive
explanation of the phenomenon. This is not to say that they necessarily offer a solution, but they stress
the need to put the three dimensions of globalization back in the center of public discourse. What
contemporary events have dramatically revealed is that its effects are potentially dangerous not only
on a global stage, but also locally. A reappraisal of globalization’s basic assumptions may be insufficient
to prevent phenomena of ideological radicalization, but it would certainly lead to a more equal and
fair world, and one in which mid-range and small powers share in responsibility for the global affairs.
    In the case of Iraq, Hoffmann’s analysis engaged primarily with the questions of jus ad bellum. He
pointed out that both the claim of illegal detention of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi regime
and the humanitarian argument were inconsistent and could serve as dangerous precedents for future
decisions. Never before, in fact, had intervention been undertaken “to forcibly remove a government
and replace it with one more acceptable to the interveners,”74 appealing to the defense of human rights.
    The war in Iraq represented an emblematic negative example of foreign policy and offered Hoff-
mann the chance to stress that if genuine multilateralism is desirable, and indeed it is the only way
to preserve stability and peace, the US had to take the first step in that direction. Notwithstanding
this general interpretation of how US foreign policy should be, his advice on Iraq was addressed to
the Bush administration, not the US administrations of the past and future. From the very beginning,
Hoffmann’s suggestion was not to declare war on Iraq. Once the decision was made, the only thing he
could do (and did) was suggest a way out.
    The problem with Hoffmann’s strategy of withdrawal is that it doesn’t reveal much on what to do
when the other actors, i.e., the UN and the EU, do not want to cooperate with the US. That is to say,
no US administration formulates its foreign policy in a historical and political vacuum.
    On Iraq, the US has basically been left alone over the course of time. Bush formulated a strategy of
withdrawal from the country in 2008, and when Barack Obama took office, that strategy was modified
and applied until the disengagement was completed in 2011. The end of the American presence in Iraq
did not exhaust the debate on war. Some connected the withdrawal of US troops to the emergence
of the Islamic State and blamed Obama (and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton) for having left
a fragile country in the hands of radical groups. This is, of course, one point of view. But it raises
an important point: once an error has been made, a major one in the case of Iraq, it is impossible
to restore the previous balance. Analyses must deal with the new world conditions, confirming what
Hoffmann thought of international relations experts; they can analyze the present, but they cannot
foresee the future.




73
     Robert O. Keohane, “Stanley Hoffmann: Three Brief Essays,” French Politics, 7:3/4 (September 1, 2009): 369.
74
     Hoffmann, “America,” 80.



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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/7156                                                         Art. #7156
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