The Lippmann Gap was a term coined by Samuel P. Huntington
in 1987. Lippmann had expressed the ideas behind it in a slender volume he
wrote during the Second World War, U.S.
Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943). Lippmann argued that the basic
principles of foreign policy had been forgotten during the nineteenth century,
when the United States was shielded by British naval power. “In that long
period the very nature of foreign policy, of what it consists and how it is
formed, was forgotten.” Not knowing what was needed, Americans could not reach
a common view:
They have forgotten the compelling
and, once seen, the self-evident common principle of all genuine foreign policy
— the principle that alone can force decisions, can settle controversy and can
induce agreement. This is the principle that in foreign relations, as in all
other relations, a policy has been formed only when commitments and power have
been brought into balance. This is the forgotten principle which must be
recovered and restored to the first place in American thought if the nation is
to achieve the foreign policy which it so desperately wants.
Without the controlling principle
that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its
purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments
related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is
impossible to think at all about foreign affairs. Yet the history of our acts
and of our declarations in the past fifty years will show that rarely, and
never consistently, have American statesmen and the American people been guided
by this elementary principle of practical life.
No one would seriously suppose that
he had a fiscal policy if he did not consider together expenditure and revenue,
outgo and income, liabilities and assets. But in foreign relations we have
habitually in our minds divorced the discussion of our war aims, our peace
aims, our ideals, our interests, our commitments, from the discussion of our
armaments, our strategic position, our potential allies and our probable
enemies. No policy could emerge from such a discussion. For what settles
practical controversy is the knowledge that ends and means have to be balanced:
an agreement has eventually to be reached when men admit that they must pay for
what they want and that they must want only what they are willing to pay for.
If they do not have to come to such an agreement, they will never except by
accident agree. For they will lack a yardstick by which to measure their ideals
and their interests, or their ways and means of protecting and promoting them.
Lippmann’s evocation of a policy that considered expenditure
and revenue together seems very quaint these days, but remember that he said it during
the largest borrowing spree in American history, the Second World War.
Americans were not innocents in such matters, even back then. His
interpretation of previous diplomacy from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to the
Spanish war of 1898 would be defended today by few historians of U.S. foreign relations. Lippmann exaggerated American dependence on British sea power and
needlessly belittled a host of American diplomatists, who were not as clueless
as he indicated. Whatever the merits of Lippmann’s historical interpretation, however,
his dicta stuck. How could they not? They seemed so right and true, so self
evident. They always did to me, at least, and I was hardly alone. Lippmann’s admonitions became the
basic framework for a host of writers on American foreign policy in the post-World War II period.
Samuel Huntington’s 1987 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Coping with the Lippmann Gap,” is a notable
instance of such usage. Huntington adopted Lippmann’s framework to interrogate
the state of American strategy in the last years of the Reagan administration.
Huntington was given at this time to some rather dubious strategies—he came up
with the idea of perfecting conventional deterrence by gearing up for offensive
operations in Eastern Europe—but he also laid out lucidly the logical
alternatives that anyone in the midst of a Lippmann Gap should consider.
Huntington took unnecessary alarm at the state of America’s defenses in 1987,
but he, like Lippmann, had a clarifying mind. In the following he laid out the
possible routes leaders might take whenever a Lippmann Gap looms large. Statesmen, he argued, can attack it in a
variety of ways. They can attempt:
—to redefine their interests and so
reduce their commitments to a level which they can sustain with their existing
capabilities;
—to reduce the threats to their
interests through diplomacy;
—to enhance the contribution of
allies to the protection of their interests;
—to increase their own resources,
usually meaning larger military forces and military budgets;
—to substitute cheaper forms of
power for more expensive ones, thus using the same resources to produce more
power;
—to devise more effective
strategies for the use of their capabilities, thereby securing also greater
output in terms of power for the same input in terms of resources.
That would seem at first glance to exhaust the options, but Huntington does not consider the possibility that a reduction of capabilities, alongside the redefinition of interests, might also cover the gap. Lippmann, too, gave greater weight to the moral forces than did Huntington, whose approach seems rather spare on that score. In his two little books of the war years, Lippmann called for a system of "organic consultation" with the members of the Atlantic Community. Such a system--more than a formal treaty of alliance but less than a political federation--reflected a community with the deepest values in common but one that could not be held together through compulsion. It was to be not "one military empire ruled from one capital" but rather "a concert of free nations held together by a realization of their common interests and acting together by consent."
Just a few
years after Huntington wrote, the end of the Cold War, followed by the collapse
of the Soviet Union, entirely transformed the American strategic situation.
Instead of a gap between power and commitments, there emerged a surfeit of
power. The expansion of commitments followed. The experience of the last decade
transformed the strategic situation yet again, leading to the emergence of The Engelhardt Gap: American military power remains preeminent
in the international system, yet the actual uses of its military power do not
achieve stated objectives and in fact produce blowback and other unanticipated
consequences.
So does the Lippmann Gap remain an illuminating metric by
which to assess US grand strategy? Using his criteria, how would you assess
America’s current world role?
