I

The concept of strategic adjustment is founded on the contention that security environments change and when this occurs, states are forced to reconsider their grand strategy.

Thus, grand strategy requires an appraisal and constant reappraisal of the international environment, a clear definition of a state's national security policy objectives and interests, an assessment of threats to these two elements, and the methods and resources needed to satisfy those objectives and interests.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, grand strategy is ‘the intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy’. It is a ‘purposeful and cohesive set of ideas’ about what the state seeks to achieve and how it will attempt to achieve its objectives.Footnote ¹² As Colin Gray and Jeannie Johnson observed, ‘Strategic practice, though massively shaped by material actualities, also is dependent upon the inspiration of ideas.’Footnote ¹³ Strategy making is also dependent upon a nation's history, geography, and culture.

In assessing a period of strategic adjustment, two perspectives come to the fore, but are interwoven, the weighing of Aussenpolitik and Innenpolitik.Footnote ¹⁴ The first deals with external threats, that is, the international context that underpins the policy-maker's perception of the security environment. In considering this component, it is necessary to understand the geopolitical changes occurring within this environment. In this particular case, policy-makers in the immediate post-cold war period confronted a changed environment that necessitated a re-evaluation of the threat, which was transforming from superpower rivalry to regional security interests. Additionally, in this changed environment, and as part of candidate Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, the US economy took on greater significance, where the catchphrase, ‘It's the economy, stupid’, was used to define President George Bush's failure to understand the American electorate's principal concern. Moreover, Clinton and his advisers believed that economic globalization was a significant force, making it necessary to focus increased attention on US economic interests, to the point of declaring that international trade was the panacea for an ailing US economy.

The second element extends beyond the inner workings of the state. It also entails the role of a foreign policy-maker's worldview or belief system, and the impact that an ‘agent of strategy making’Footnote ¹⁵ can have in creating a strategic vision and connecting national interests to policy.

In analysing strategic adjustment from this perspective, scholars have offered various explanations, one of which is particularly pertinent to Lake's role in fashioning US grand strategy during Clinton's first term. Known as the ‘cultural-cognitive’ approach, it stems from the recognition that a state's strategy has ‘intellectual’ origins’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, the change in US grand strategy articulated in the 1994 National security strategy represents Lake's assumptions and beliefs about how the ‘world works’. As Edward Rhodes contends, in this explanation, foreign policy-makers are considering the ‘nature of the state and the state's relationship to the outside world’; ‘beliefs about the “nature of war”’ or, more broadly, the use of military force; and the role of the military as one instrument of national power.Footnote ¹⁷ This is not to suggest that the 1994 National security strategy as published does not allow for bureaucratic or institutional explanations, especially since the document went through twenty-one drafts to achieve consensus among cabinet officers.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, such explanations are insufficient because of the cultural and cognitive turmoil that was occurring in the 1990s, when the old schemas were no longer useful, and use of cold war experience as a guide was now flawed. Policy-makers, in this period and others, often rely on the ‘lessons of history’, that is, analogical reasoning, to make sense of a situation that may in fact bear no resemblance to the current one.Footnote ¹⁹ As schema theorists contend, these officials, in attempting to make sense of their environment, draw from what they have learned from various experiences, acquiring and preserving views about how human endeavours and the environment relate to one another. However, in doing so they don perceptual blinders, biases, which are difficult to shed or modify.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, in this instance, cold war experience was actually a hindrance.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out that dynamic environments, such as the threat environment, are ‘worse than irregular’, but ‘wicked environments, in which professionals are likely to learn the wrong lessons from experience’. Furthermore, professionals can use intuitive competencies and heuristics in various situations and with respect to particular tasks, but ‘they have not learned to identify the situation and the tasks in which intuition betrays them. The unrecognized limits of professional skill help explain why experts are often overconfident.’Footnote ²¹ In essence, the dramatic contextual changes that emerged after 1989 (the ‘fall’ of the Berlin Wall) demanded new ways of thinking, seeing the environment afresh. Anthony Lake, like many other pundits and policy-makers, had to reorient his mental map, his cognitive frames. He proved, however, to have a ‘flexible’ mental map, in which he displayed a high ‘degree of intellectual openness to new ideas’ in the swiftly changing environment of the cold war and its immediate aftermath.Footnote ²²

The underlying premise of the extensive literature on cognitive bounds and predispositions in strategic decision-making is that foreign policy executives, defined as top-level governmental officials charged with developing grand strategy, have cognitive models that govern ‘whether and how new stimuli will be noticed, encoded, and acted upon’.Footnote ²³ Scholars have long used these cognitive models, also known as mental maps, to explain US foreign relations. Historian Alan Henrikson points out that policy-makers and diplomats order the information they receive within the framework of their ‘large-scale geographical environment, in part or in its entirety’. He adds that mental maps help these policy-makers to ‘orient themselves to the world’, and therefore the maps comprise both physical geography and ‘real and imagined movements in space’, useful in dealing with ‘specific kinds of spatial problems, such as military, economic, or political challenges’. Further, mental maps are not fixed but are malleable; such events as technological advances and geostrategic change can modify them.Footnote ²⁴ Mental maps also consist of psychological characteristics by which foreign policy executives interpret strategic situations using knowledge, perception, beliefs, and goals.Footnote ²⁵ Given these factors, it is important to recognize that mental maps are not only a cognitive device, but are ‘maps of ideas’, a form of ‘cartographic imagery’.Footnote ²⁶ In this sense, the cartographic map evokes symbols psychically connected to the national values, enduring beliefs, and ethics that underlie national purpose and thus contribute to a worldview. This point is consistent with the notion of a ‘geographical mind’, which the political geographer Jean Gottmann assigns to the ‘realm of ideas’, and which is linked to ‘geographical images’. These images are expressed in language or catchphrases (he uses the term ‘Arc of Crisis’ as an example), in physical maps and charts, and in political ‘formulas’ (the doctrine of ‘containment’, for example) conveyed from one generation to another. Gottmann indicates that these terms and objects became ‘icons in the minds of Western policymakers’.Footnote ²⁷ Icons are the cultural images that represent nations or territories, and which are ultimately ‘vehicles for identity’.Footnote ²⁸ While icons relate to inner space and are territorial-related and constructed by human communities, they are entangled in ‘outer space’, also interacting with the external forces of change whereby people, resources (financial, merchandise, and natural), ideas, and information circulate.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, icons call to mind how people perceive and describe themselves, including their national myths, founding documents, and the symbolic discourse used to explain the cultural space in which they reside. In the case of Lake, the grand strategy found in the 1994 National security strategy exemplified his understanding or representation of America (its collective history, political memory, and self-image), its place in the international order (in terms of geography and relative power), and his identity (spatial and psychological) as an American.

II

The early 1990s represented for many scholars a historical divide between the cold war era of four and a half decades and the emergence of a ‘new world order’, a term surprisingly coined by President George Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a dyed-in-the-wool realist.Footnote ³⁰ Nonetheless, Bush, who had substantial experience in foreign affairs, was not able to realize his vision of a post-cold war international order that would be more stable and peaceful.Footnote ³¹ Upon assuming the presidency, Clinton inherited from Bush several nettlesome foreign policy problems in the Balkans, Somalia, and Haiti, but he also gained a number of regional institutional initiatives, particularly economic projects, that he could build upon during his two terms in office. These included the North American Free Trade Agreement, stronger ties through the Asia-Pacific Economic Council to demonstrate US commitment to the region and to ensure that this body's focus was trans-Pacific in orientation, and the development of deeper relations with East European countries, formerly part of the Warsaw Pact, the European Community, and the Conference on Security Co-operation in Europe.Footnote ³² In essence, according to one scholar, ‘the idea was to pursue innovative regional strategies that resulted in new institutional frameworks for post-cold war relations’.Footnote ³³ Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, remarked that these efforts were akin to the institution-building activities the United States led after the Second World War under President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and he believed that the Bush administration ‘should take a leaf from their book’.Footnote ³⁴

Yet, the Bush administration never developed a grand strategy in the months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It published a National security strategy in August 1991, and a final National security strategy just before President Clinton's inauguration, which was largely a legacy document to record its achievements. In fact, it specifically called for a grand strategy of ‘collective engagement’ but emphasized regional activities as the way of achieving policy objectives, especially in Asia and Europe.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, it was now up to Clinton, the first president elected in the post-cold war era, to chart the way ahead. On this last point, a number of scholars, pundits, and former US government officials eagerly offered their views publicly, but they also lacked consensus about what recent world events portended.

The issue of the US role in the post-cold war became a topic of discussion shortly after the ‘fall’ of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, but in the United States, its immediate impact was largely one that resulted in a series of congressional actions that focused on reducing defence spending with scant attention being paid to strategy. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and, equally important, the 1992 presidential campaign brought the issue to new prominence among the foreign policy elite. The Council of Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs published an article in its 1992 summer issue that raised the essential question, ‘What does a superpower do in a world no longer dominated by superpower conflict?’Footnote ³⁶ In the view of some Democrats in Congress, the superpower's obligation was to reduce defence spending and reap a ‘peace dividend’ that could be applied to domestic priorities, a view that the liberal wing of the party held. Conservative, and some moderate, Democrats, principally from the South and Midwest, such as Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia who chaired the Armed Services Committee, opposed deep defence funding cuts until Bush and his national security team formulated a new national military strategy to address the changed threat environment and where sensible cost savings could be achieved. Nunn agreed with Bush's analysis of the ‘nation's broad national interests and objectives’.Footnote ³⁷ Nonetheless, despite this division, the Clinton campaign found that a broad coalition could be formed within the Democratic Party that believed democracy and American values defined the best of US foreign policy. In essence, former cold war hawks and doves could be brought together to pursue this vision.Footnote ³⁸ As Henry Kissinger later commented, this was not merely the perspective of a particular political party; there was an ‘American consensus’ along these lines, a belief that ‘the ultimate Wilsonian vision would be fulfilled’.Footnote ³⁹ For Lake, it was also an attempt to ‘heal the Democratic Party's deep wounds over foreign policy’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Scholars offered their views on US national interests and on the major strategic issues that the nation would confront in the 1990s. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington admitted that he did not have answers to the important questions the new environment raised with respect to issues with which political scientists concerned themselves, such as power, alliances, and the use of military force. He argued that these issues and others would be subject to debate for years before agreement occurred. Instead, he pinpointed three major strategic interests the United States would now need to concentrate on given the ‘new geopolitical realities’: maintaining its role as ‘the premier global power’, preventing the rise of a hegemon in Eurasia, and protecting US interests in the developing world, principally the Middle East and the Americas.Footnote ⁴¹ Nonetheless, Huntington remained optimistic that these events served to underscore the existence of a ‘third wave of democratization in the history of the modern world’. He had no doubts that there would be impediments to democratization in some regions of the world, but that economic progress and political leaders in the developing world who believed that democracy was the best political system would make the difference.Footnote ⁴²

Pierre Jacquet, a French scholar, offered a different view, chiefly focused on the economic order resulting from the growth of emerging market economies. He held that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not evidence that the post-Second World War international order had ended and a new order had replaced it. He agreed that there had been major changes in the political and military realms, and this transformation influenced strategic thinking about alliances, defence, and foreign policy, but the Western free market system remained, and it was a potent force for change. He saw the new order in evolutionary terms, one where co-operation would be required to ‘manage international economic interdependence’.Footnote ⁴³

Pundits, practitioners, and even a former president suggested proposals for how the United States should handle the changed environment. Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist, in a speech later published in Foreign Affairs, characterized the changed circumstances as ‘the unipolar moment’. With this term, he contended that the ‘center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies’. He argued as well that the internationalist position was under attack by conservative isolationists, reminiscent of their 1930s predecessors. He envisioned a world in which the threat of conflict would increase, not abate, because of the emergence of states with weapons of mass destruction and the capacity to use them. The times, he claimed, demanded the United States use its strength and will to lead this unipolar world, by setting down the ‘rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Christopher Layne, an attorney with a doctorate in political science, wrote a riposte to Krauthammer entitled ‘The unipolar illusion’. He maintained that while some commentators suggested that with the US victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States should pursue a grand strategy of preponderance designed to preserve its advantage in a unipolar world order, this opportunity would not last. The ‘unipolar moment’ was merely an ‘interlude’, and that within a decade, a multi-polar order would emerge with new great powers challenging US hegemony. Therefore, the United States needed a grand strategy that governed this possibly complicated transition to the multi-polar order while furthering US interests.Footnote ⁴⁵

Former President Richard Nixon added his voice to the debate, writing that the United States was now the only superpower in the world and its foreign policy needed to adapt to the ‘radically new environment’. He too underscored that a response on the part of many on the left and right at this point might be an inclination toward isolationism. This would be a foolhardy reaction. Instead, he made the case that ‘American world leadership will be indispensable in the coming decade’, as the ‘roller-coaster ride’ of events since 1989 had revealed. Already, he claimed, three myths were surfacing, ‘the myth of the end of history’, which Francis Fukuyama had put forward; ‘the myth of the irrelevance of military power’; and the ‘myth of the decline of America’. As a grand strategy, Nixon resorted first to a hierarchy of national interests (‘vital, critical and peripheral’) and stated, ‘Our overall security strategy must calibrate what we will do to protect an interest to its strategic importance.’ Consequently, United States’ values and its enduring interests would serve as guides to its three vital interests: the ‘survival of democratic states’, as well as economic prosperity through free trade, and support of democratic political government. All of these interests had to be tempered by the costs and risks involved in pursuing them, recognition of the limits of American power.Footnote ⁴⁶

These arguments and many others swirled around in media outlets, among the academic community as subjects for discussion and debate at symposia, and in the conference rooms of the Pentagon and ‘Foggy Bottom’ (US Department of State). Observers of the Clinton administration searched for its ‘new foreign policy doctrine to replace George Kennan's concept of anti-communist containment’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In mid-July 1993, the Economist thought they saw a glimpse of an emerging doctrine that consisted of two components: management of economic globalization and preventive diplomacy as a way to resolve potential conflict. The Congressional Research Service tried its hand at prognostication by analysing several speeches that the president and three of his senior foreign policy advisers made early in the presidency that outlined themes designed to steer US foreign policy. As the report's author speculated, the speeches seemed to be an attempt to define the administration's foreign policy, but they could also be interpreted as a refutation of critics’ claims that it was not paying sufficient attention to this area.Footnote ⁴⁸

In fact, Anthony Lake in particular, was giving dedicated attention to this area, but the demands of daily administrative activities as a presidential special assistant and world events often diverted his attention. Equally important to the delay in formulating a ‘Clinton doctrine’ was the lack of consensus about the direction of US foreign policy.Footnote ⁴⁹ As one scholar has noted, the circumstances, the debate, and even the difference of opinion only made the management of foreign policy more difficult.Footnote ⁵⁰ The same scholar points out that within the administration, Lake gained a high level of control over foreign affairs to the degree that Dick Morris, a Clinton insider and political strategist, described ‘Lake's influence as a “regency”, implying Clinton maintained only minimal control of the process’ by which foreign policy was fashioned.Footnote ⁵¹ Others in the administration recognized Lake as a ‘man of ideas’.Footnote ⁵² It would be those ideas, resident in his mental map, that underpinned Clinton's grand strategy during the first term, and which deserve greater attention.

III

The construction and evolution of Lake's mental map results from three ‘developmental experiences’ that created the ‘pyscho-mileu’ in which he would later operate (the ‘operational milieu’) as national security adviser.Footnote ⁵³ The first of these experiences, after graduating from Harvard College in 1961 (concentrating in American history with a special interest in colonial history) and reading international economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, was his tenure as a foreign service officer in the US Department of State. This experience includes as well his subsequent pursuit of a doctorate in international relations at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, from which he received his degree in 1974.Footnote ⁵⁴

President John F. Kennedy's rhetoric drew Lake into public service along with a belief in the doctrine of containment and the importance of democracy as an antidote to communism. These factors led him to request the Department of State to assign him to South Vietnam.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, the Vietnam War and Anthony Lake's role in it as a consular officer in Hué and Saigon, aide to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge II in Saigon, and a member of Henry Kissinger's staff in the administration of President Richard Nixon, played a significant part in defining Lake's worldview and, ultimately, his beliefs about the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy. Lake's mental map diverged from that of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. ‘On their [Nixon and Kissinger] mental map, the rest of the countries on the globe became blank spots, without individual character or history or motive, as lacking in feature and distinctive shape as squares on a chessboard.’Footnote ⁵⁶ On Lake's mental map, the ‘blank spots’ were filled in – distinct in various respects. His experience in Southeast Asia resulted in questions about who the Vietnamese were in terms of their identity as a people, and why the Viet Cong, communists and nationalists, were politically more popular than the Saigon regime.Footnote ⁵⁷

As he wrote in 1976, ‘For even if we do not want to think about the war, it has changed us, and we are condemned to act out the unconscious, as well as the conscious, “lessons” we have learned.’Footnote ⁵⁸ While there is no doubt that the war was a decisive event that shaped Lake's thinking, and resulted in his resignation from the US foreign service in 1970 because of his dissatisfaction with the direction in which US policy was heading with respect to the conflict, it did not define it. He was also quick to point out in his reflection that political leaders cannot base policy simply on experience. They must learn from the ‘conceptual, political and institutional imperatives’ that prompted US involvement in the war and the ‘unconscious assumptions’ at work.Footnote ⁵⁹ In Lake's view, the most important lesson to derive from the ‘horror’ of Vietnam was the humbling realization that the United States was not as omnipotent as it believed itself to be but was instead, a nation with limited power.Footnote ⁶⁰

Scholars that he read or studied under in graduate school influenced Lake's worldview and became not only part of his strategic vision but had some bearing on his assessment of the strategic environment. The influence of his former mentor, Richard H. Ullman, a professor at Princeton University, was especially important in fashioning his mental map. Ullman was an important scholar of US foreign policy who served in government and on the editorial board of the New York Times. For Lake, Ullman was the embodiment of ‘common sense liberalism’.Footnote ⁶¹ Ullman spent considerable time investigating the influence of Wilson on America's international conduct. From Ullman, Lake assumed the belief that the health of a democracy was reliant upon its institutions, its civic culture, and the sense of responsibility its citizens bear. Moreover, he agreed with Ullman's view that since the late 1940s, US national security had been defined in terms of military threats, but now the government had a role not only in protecting its citizens against traditional threats such as war, but in addition, threats to human security, such as the effects from natural disasters and epidemics.Footnote ⁶²

Following graduate studies, Lake served as director of International Voluntary Services, a non-governmental organization, and on the boards of Save the Children and the Overseas Development Council. From these experiences, he believed that a new order had commenced with the termination of American involvement in the Vietnam War and the end of realpolitik as a guiding foreign policy philosophy. A new Wilsonian moment was taking place in his opinion, not the cheap, crude caricature of messianic idealism often associated with the early twentieth-century president, but a ‘pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism’, a term he would use to describe his own policy position in the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency.Footnote ⁶³ Lake would stop using this term publicly to describe himself after the Baltimore Sun editorial board ridiculed him for it.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nonetheless, he believed the term described his policy orientation in which American foreign policy needed clear objectives as well as adherence to the principles of democracy, human rights, and negotiated solutions to conflict. It also had to be unrelentingly pragmatic in pursuing these goals.Footnote ⁶⁵

This self-described policy perspective gradually revealed itself in the early 1970s with Lake's concerns about the credibility of US foreign policy and its corrosive effects on public confidence and the character of representative democracy.Footnote ⁶⁶ Of particular concern was that US foreign policy had become an abstraction, effused with concepts such as prestige, interests, and credibility but not attentive to the human costs of executing policy, which ‘imagined consequences’ effectively and largely catalysed. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Lake argued for ‘a more humanistic foreign policy’ that ‘would require weighing the human costs and benefits as one of the principal and unashamedly legitimate considerations in any decision’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Lake's thinking in this period concerned itself with US foreign policy toward the so-called third world and his assertion that the United States had adopted short-sighted goals driven by its preoccupation with supporting repressive anti-communist powers.Footnote ⁶⁸ He believed this fixation on Soviet entrance into the less developed world was confining, an unhealthy preoccupation with short-term interests versus a longer perspective. He clearly articulated this position in his 1976 book The ‘tar baby’ option: American policy toward southern Rhodesia. In the book's foreword, the Carnegie Endowment's president Thomas L. Hughes observed that Lake's book demonstrated how US actions in southern Africa had not only contributed to suppression of African blacks by a white minority, thereby discrediting itself, but had ‘an adverse effect on the development and strength of the United Nations and of respect for international law’. These two factors, as Hughes pointed out, ‘may well have contributed to the further weakening of institutions, which it [the United States] may find useful if not essential in the future’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The second development experience was his tenure as director of policy planning in the Department of State, a political appointment, during the Carter administration. This experience was also part of his strategic apprenticeship, but his function should not be overemphasized since he did not have a substantial role in shaping the administration's foreign policy. He was one of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's ‘third-level appointments’, a member of the ‘“junior varsity” of foreign and military policy experts’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Gaddis Smith notes, Lake was one of a cohort of junior officials: ‘all young, with experience both inside and outside government, articulate, and members of the anti-Vietnam generation’.Footnote ⁷¹ Lake's principal responsibility was to direct a staff that conducted policy analysis and provided counsel to the secretary of state by taking a long-term, strategic view of global trends and offering recommendations to the secretary.Footnote ⁷²

Nonetheless, in this position, Lake would refine his foreign policy stance, incorporating both pragmatism and ‘traditional American principles’. As he remarked at the time, ‘Our [the Carter administration] approach is to make constant, pragmatic, case-by-case decisions, seeking the most constructive balance among our interests and adjusting our tactics as circumstances change.’Footnote ⁷³ Human rights policy was of particular interest to Lake in the opening weeks of the Carter presidency, taking his cue from Carter's rhetoric on the subject in the 1976 presidential campaign and comments that Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had made. In response, Lake offered Vance specific near-term and long-term recommendations on how human rights could be incorporated into US foreign policy, a concern that Vance shared and had articulated to his senior staff.Footnote ⁷⁴ The formulation of human rights policy was not a simple issue. To achieve effective results, the policy required enough flexibility to address different situations, as a single category of human rights does not exist. There are actually three types: political, economic, and social. Furthermore, there must be prioritization among the three, as well as a recognition of the importance of integrating issues effectively to attain policy coherence, and an understanding of the implications that result from policy implementation, the so-called second- and third-order effects.Footnote ⁷⁵

In a speech before the World Affairs Council in Boston, Massachusetts, Lake underscored that US foreign policy rested on ‘national ideals’, ideas such as liberty and individual rights, and that America's responsibility was to ‘promote’ and ‘help shape a new world’ in which the causes of ‘peace, economic development, and individual rights’ would triumph. He argued that the pragmatic component necessitated that policy-makers measure ‘progress’ toward achieving these objectives through ‘practical action’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Underpinning this approach were six major themes. They were: maintaining and fostering peace in regional trouble spots; enhancing co-operation with allies; avoiding nuclear conflict through arms control and détente; building Americans’ trust in their government's policies; increasing an awareness of the intricate and new global issues (energy, food, population, and economic development) confronting the international community; and basing US foreign policy decisions ‘firmly on the values of the American people’, which could be captured under the term ‘human rights’. The new global challenges that the international community confronted could not be managed by individual states. Such an approach was the thinking of a bygone era. Instead, meeting them required co-operative action, not the persistent division of the world into two camps: allies and adversaries. Co-operation was also of economic importance because a dispersion of power was already occurring and would continue into the next decade. The United States, Lake held, was ‘participating in the construction of a pluralistic world order in which all states, of necessity, must join’. Such an approach required a strong United Nations and the formation of global coalitions. The task of US leadership was to assist in establishing these global coalitions dedicated to non-security issues and to guide them in constructive directions.Footnote ⁷⁷

During his tenure in the Carter administration, Lake underscored these points repeatedly in memoranda, speeches, and congressional testimony, particularly with respect to Africa, a region in which he had a personal interest because of his previous studies at Princeton University.Footnote ⁷⁸ His statements demonstrated a belief that north–south relations were emerging as an increasingly vital factor in US foreign policy. He believed the continent could serve as a laboratory for implementing two of the aforementioned themes: building peace and promoting economic development. These two themes placed an importance on diplomacy as a policy instrument, including multi-lateral efforts, and highlighted the value of foreign policy and international institutions that promoted a ‘world order which serves human beings’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In addition, he called attention to the importance of peaceful change toward majority rule through democratic solutions and the protection of human rights throughout the region.Footnote ⁸⁰

In essence, Lake argued for de-linking the third world from the East–West rivalry so that economic growth could occur rather than these regions serving as a literal battleground for US–Soviet interests. The US policy focus should remain on advancing economic equity and growth in a world that was already becoming more economically interdependent. It was a world that necessitated managing co-operation between ‘the governments of industrial democracies’ and developing nations, because the structure of the international system was steadily moving toward a global community in which all countries had responsibilities as well as rights. Economics was now the driving force, which meant that US economic development policy should concentrate on liberalizing trade, ensuring adequate balance of payment financing, improving foreign assistance performance and reorienting it toward impoverished people in these regions, stabilizing commodity price fluctuations, and facilitating the flow of investment and technology on terms equitable to corporations and governments.Footnote ⁸¹

Nonetheless, Lake's vision for the third world always had to be tempered by the reality of world events. Thus, in a 1978 speech, he offered a clear definition of foreign policy priorities. The first of which is the importance of maintaining a capable military to defend the United States and its allies, including a strategic deterrent. However, US security interests required the control of nuclear weapons through negotiated treaties and, thus, his acknowledgement that relations with the Soviet Union were the central feature of US national security policy. Furthermore, regional disputes must not become the ignition point for a war between the superpowers.Footnote ⁸² President Carter spoke to the issue of Soviet expansionism in Africa in his commencement address at the US Naval Academy in June 1978, drawing from Lake's outline for the address and particularly the principal components of American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁸³ Nonetheless, in Lake's view, ‘The greatest challenge to American foreign policy makers in the next generation will be to find constructive ways in which to co-operate with other nations in “managing interdependence” – not only interdependence on security issues, but interdependence on questions of economic and ecological survival.’Footnote ⁸⁴

Lake's third important development experience was his academic career in the 1980s. With Carter's re-election defeat in November 1980, Lake accepted a position as Five College professor of political science in western Massachusetts, teaching at Amherst and Mount Holyoke Colleges. His writings in this period emphasized many of the themes contained in his previous articles and speeches: the diffusion of power and, hence, the limits of American power, the harnessing of pragmatism to principles, and an over-riding belief in progress. There was also the recognition that US influence had not, and often cannot, attain the promise that policy-makers believe possible. In his most practical voice, Lake underscored that with respect to developing countries, US foreign assistance programmes must be focused on specific, realistic measures. Diplomatic and development strategies, he stressed, are long-term approaches that call for patience and commitment.Footnote ⁸⁵

Lake's interest in the developing world continued as a major topic in his academic writings throughout the 1980s, and in particular, he was interested in the educative value of policy failure, noting Woodrow Wilson's caution that ‘government is not a body of blind forces [but] a body of men…nor a machine but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Specifically, Lake concerned himself with US policy objectives and power, the relationship of domestic politics and foreign policy, the importance of contemplating history to anticipate the future, and the sources of revolutionary upheavals in the third world.Footnote ⁸⁷

With respect to the last, he aimed his sights at what he called ‘radical regimes’, which he defined as governments that demonstrate a ‘consistent immoderation in their behavior’ and ‘regularly and grossly violate’ international norms expressed in the United Nations Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. Among these regimes, he included Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iran as well as states in Indochina and southern Africa, each of which he would use as a case-study for this argument. In dissecting this issue, he placed his attention on the Carter administration and the Reagan administration's first term.Footnote ⁸⁸

Lake claimed that in almost every instance, US policy-makers, regardless of administration, had failed to deal with these regimes successfully. The failure had been both conceptual and practical, lacking a coherent and consistent approach, using both incentives and negative sanctions, in what he termed ‘liberal and conservative’ schools of thought. These schools differed little in determining the US interests at stake. Instead, they represented weighty, philosophical differences in methods and priorities, as reflected in differences of opinion about the nature of third world radical regimes, the gravity of the threat that these governments created for US interests, the extent of and reasons for their bonds with the Soviet Union, the limits of US influence, and the legitimacy of various means selected to shape these regimes’ behaviours.Footnote ⁸⁹

In examining the Carter and Reagan administrations, Lake concluded that no single theoretical approach worked effectively in every case, ‘or even almost always works’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He did not dismiss the importance of debating the two approaches since such efforts brought into focus the objectives and values the United States should pursue when facing the challenges that these regimes presented. Doctrine alone, however, was insufficient as a guide. He offered an alternative: ‘Policies can best be shaped, therefore, by asking questions about each situation rather than pretending to know the theoretical answers, even before the questions are posed.’Footnote ⁹¹

IV

After more than a decade in academia, Lake joined Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser, helping the candidate define his foreign policy priorities. He was the principal architect for Clinton's ‘key pro-democracy foreign policy speech’ in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the month before election day, in which the candidate clearly established his foreign policy agenda by characterizing President George Bush's policy as unprincipled, one in which despots were favoured over democracies.Footnote ⁹² Writing in the New York Times, columnist A. M. Rosenthal observed, ‘The campaign of 1992, so long a desert of tedium and cynicism, has finally produced what the country has needed for too many dry years – a lucid, warm adult statement of principle about what the United States can give to the world, and gain from it.’ He declared the speech the quintessential expression of one of the two rival internationalist foreign policy stances, which he termed ‘democratic realism’, based on the ‘moral, political and economic strength of political freedom’.Footnote ⁹³

When Clinton won the election, he selected Lake as his special assistant for national security affairs (commonly known as the national security adviser). In the first eight months following Clinton's inauguration, Lake spent his time organizing the national security council (NSC) staff and dealing with the immediate problems the new administration confronted. There was also the issue of Clinton's attention, which appeared to be more focused on domestic issues, because the US economy was in a slump.Footnote ⁹⁴ Meanwhile, the foreign policy elite, their journalistic partners, and Republican and Democratic leaders decried the lack of US grand vision and leadership on the part of the first post-cold war president.

Following several weeks of brainstorming in the summer of 1993, Lake, with the help of his staff, had a ‘blueprint for America's post-cold war foreign policy’ and a slogan as well. According to one participant, Lake wanted the policy vision to be associated with a ‘ringing phrase that would merge neo-Wilsonian idealism with hard-core neo-Morganthaulian realism’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The overarching policy orientation that should guide US grand strategy after the cold war was already in place in Lake's mind, casting back to the American experience in Vietnam, he believed that the nation's involvement was not so much a mistake by the US government, but a nation in the grip of simplistic analogies, the Munich analogy in particular. The answers to policy challenges came from asking the right questions. A more adaptable approach was required, as conditions and situations changed and interests varied.Footnote ⁹⁶ Lake revealed the administration's new foreign policy vision in that speech at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, with the title ‘From containment to enlargement’ on 21 September 1993.

Ultimately, after a year and a half in office, the Clinton administration jettisoned the piecemeal approach of speeches and articles outlining its foreign policy objectives and produced a document that represented a comprehensive assessment of the international environment, its major policy objectives and priorities, and the ways by which it intended to realize these aims. Entitled A national security strategy of engagement and enlargement, the White House released it in July 1994 under the president's signature. Nonetheless, it was a text shaped by Lake's appraisal of the world situation and his strategic vision. It was natural for Lake as the national security adviser to establish the strategic vision for the administration at this point, as the president was still a novice in national security matters. Furthermore, as one scholar has noted, ‘In very broad terms, Clinton's foreign policy advisory system was driven by the NSC staff in the White House. Tony Lake never pretended that a NSA [national security adviser] could be merely a neutral broker, simply filtering competing views up to the president.’Footnote ⁹⁷

The strategy's introduction stressed that the primary security imperative of the past fifty years – containing communist expansion while preventing nuclear war – had ceased to exist. In its stead, the strategy pointed out that a new security environment had emerged that provided opportunities but also troubling uncertainties and clear threats, ones that Lake had articulated earlier: tumultuous economic and political transitions, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, repressive regimes bent on destabilizing various regions, and a resurgence of militant nationalism coupled with ethnic and religious conflict. These security risks, however, were not solely military but also consisted of transnational phenomena such as terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and environmental degradation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet, at the same time, American leadership had never been ‘more essential’.Footnote ⁹⁹

Calling for active engagement abroad, the document reiterated the basic objectives of government as found in the preamble of the Constitution, observing that the end of the cold war had not altered the fundamental purposes, underscoring the crucial link between values and interests, that is, providing for the common defence, promoting the general welfare, and securing liberty. To achieve those ends, the administration reduced the four objectives that Lake had articulated nine months earlier to three: enhancing US security by maintaining a strong defence and promoting co-operative security; opening foreign markets and encouraging economic growth; and promoting democracy. These objectives were predicated on enlarging the community of market democracies, and premised on the belief that the more that democracy and political and economic liberalization took hold in the world, particularly in countries of geostrategic importance to the United States, the safer the nation would likely be and the more its citizens would prosper.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In terms of the ways by which these objectives would be attained, the strategy underscored that the most important instrument was ‘preventive diplomacy’, using such means as economic assistance, overseas military presence, military-to-military contacts, and participation in multi-lateral negotiations to decrease tensions and resolve conflicts before they became crises. These measures were prudent investments, because they increased the likelihood of settling problems with the least human and material costs. Additionally, while the United States was a powerful nation, it must be selective in its engagement, concentrating on the challenges most relevant to US interests, especially its long-term interests, and directing its resources where they could produce an optimal outcome. This approach necessitated strong alliances and partnerships as well as the efficient allocation of scarce resources to counter the threats mentioned previously by deterring and, where necessary, defeating aggression. The security element must also be tied to the promotion of US economic prosperity through greater access to foreign markets and the vital interest of unrestricted access to oil. Lastly, the strategy highlighted the importance of making US values attractive abroad through a ‘pragmatic commitment’ to help freedom take hold where it would further US aims through democratic enlargement.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In sum, the document reflected Lake's perspective and ideas, in some cases his actual words, regarding the international context in which the Clinton administration was operating and how US interests and values could be advanced. It reflected his long-held belief that the world was becoming more integrated, interdependent, which necessitated the importance of co-operation and webs of interlocking agreements and other protocols to renew the US economy and to create a more peaceful world. Further, diplomacy and economic assistance were preferred over military force, but harkening to his writings on radical regimes, the document clearly articulated his beliefs that policy-makers must consider several critical questions to guide their decisions on when to employ force.

Through the remainder of 1994 and into 1995, Lake refined and distilled the tenets articulated in the strategy, stressing the criticality of engagement. He repudiated Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ concept in which people's cultural and religious identities were the basis for post-cold war conflict, in addition to Francis Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ concept. In his opinion, the ongoing battle was between ideas such as freedom, liberty and pluralism, and tyranny and intolerance. He underscored the utility of military power, but not at the expense of American diplomacy and economic power.Footnote ¹⁰²

More importantly, Lake defined and prioritized seven US national interests where the use of force could be applied: (1) defend against direct attacks on the United States and its allies; (2) counter aggression; (3) defend the most important US economic interests; (4) preserve, promote, and defend democracy; (5) prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, prevent terrorism, and combat narcotics trafficking; (6) maintain US commitments to other nations; and (7) for humanitarian purposes, alleviate suffering caused by famine and other natural disasters, and stop gross violations of human rights. Furthermore, he indicated that interests alone did not decide when and where force would be used. The interests at stake had to be measured against the costs and benefits of each instance, taking into consideration such factors as risk but, additionally, a clear understanding that there is a clear mission to be achieved and the means to succeed are at hand. Military power, he highlighted, acted as a servant to diplomacy, with the warning that ‘power without diplomacy is dangerously lacking in purpose’.Footnote ¹⁰³

While the Clinton administration published subsequent national security strategies in February 1995 and 1996, the basic principles remained the same, as did the belief that engagement and enlargement advanced US interests. Lake affirmed publicly that the United States had a ‘special role in the world’, to ‘defend, enlarge, and strengthen the community of democratic nations’ by bringing its interests and values to bear, but reiterating not as the world's police officer. Diplomacy remained the tool of first resort; yet, military strength and the selective use of force were still required to deter or defeat threats from rogue states and terrorists.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Equally important was Lake's declaration in 1996 that the twenty-first century would be a ‘new American century’, and the imperative of laying the foundations now through America's global leadership. Underscoring again his belief in long-term planning, Lake outlined what he called four ‘construction problems’ to meet the challenges of the future. The first was increased attention to the Asia-Pacific region with respect to strengthening alliances and bilateral initiatives, especially with Japan and South Korea. The second was promoting European integration by weaving together military co-operation, market economies, and strong democracies, but also turning a NATO–Russian relationship into a mature partnership. This goal could be accomplished by reducing the probability that terrorists or rogue states could acquire nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction through arms control treaties, improving the security of nuclear materials, and seeking to destroy terrorist networks through international co-operation and increased resources applied to counteract this threat. The last goal was the revitalization of the US economy that would result from US efforts to create a global trading system.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In the remaining weeks before the 1996 presidential election, Lake, now in his final months as Clinton's national security adviser, offered a coda to the previous four years’ foreign policy challenges. It was a recommendation for how foreign relations should be conducted in the next century as well, and it came after his visit to China.

Lest anyone doubt the place of the United States in that new world, Lake asserted that changes in the strategic landscape did not occur without American leadership and that the debate over that role, which had occurred the previous four years, had been won by the internationalists in both political parties.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

V

Since the beginning of the Republic, a prominent historian has written, ‘the ideas of American foreign relations have typically arisen from questions regarding the national interest: to wit, what is the national interest, and how might it be promoted?’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To answer those two questions, Lake drew upon two traditions in American foreign policy, which he then combined with the work of contemporary scholars and teachers, as well as governmental experience, especially as a young diplomat in South Vietnam and on Henry Kissinger's staff, to fashion his belief in ‘pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism’. More specifically, his beliefs rest on American ideals and values, and had their evolution during the cold war era, a period with its exquisitely developed schemata, scripts, and images.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thus, his approach did not represent the ethos of the ‘new world order’ that other members of the policy elite who have appropriated the neo-Wilsonian label have embraced. These members have emphasized humanitarian intervention, assertive multi-lateralism, the limits of state sovereignty, or the responsibility to protect. His philosophy remained grounded in ‘old truths’: the debate over the role of the United States in the world and the continuing importance of national power. However, to paraphrase H. W. Brands, any study of US grand strategy must begin with the study of ideas.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The same holds true for any assessment of Lake's influence on the Clinton administration's grand strategy, for, as he once remarked, ‘ideas matter. They are at stake in most of the daily struggles we see around the world.’ For him, history is the enduring contest between ‘freedom and tyranny’, between the rule of law and the illegitimate use of force, between ‘hope and fear’.Footnote ¹¹¹

A person's mental map is not the product of a single experience, but an intricate weaving of beliefs, attitudes, experience, and socialization. Anthony Lake is no different and his worldview shaped the Clinton administration's foreign policy and, more impressively, its national security strategy in the president's first term. Grand strategy relies on a perception and an understanding of external threats and events as well as internal forces (e.g., regime type, institutions, and culture) and the idiosyncrasies of the individuals who make it.Footnote ¹¹² In interpreting Lake's impact on US grand strategy, it is necessary to grasp his views on America's national purpose, its interests, his strategic vision, and his appraisal of the international environment, particularly after the USSR ceased to exist.

Although Lake received a doctoral degree in international relations from Princeton University and held an academic post for eleven years, he did not think of himself as an academic, but as a practitioner. In assuming such a stance, Lake likely modelled himself on George Kennan, the diplomat and public intellectual he mentioned frequently in his writings and speeches, although the two men held distinctly opposites philosophies about international relations. No more pronounced was the distinction between Lake and Kennan than the ideas the former addressed in his speech, ‘Direction in US foreign policy: ideals and interests’, a year after leaving government.

Lake stated that in preparing for this address, he was ‘struck by how impossible it is [sic], whatever the elegance and internal consistency of the arguments written by anybody on the issue, actually to live a professional life dedicated wholly to either interests or ideals, to be simply a realist or a Wilsonian’.Footnote ¹¹³ His belief was in principled pragmatism, whereby American power stood behind the enduring beliefs and values articulated in the founding documents of the Republic. These beliefs and values guide US interests, based on its national purpose, which is to promote democracy. Democracy promotion is not to be achieved by force, although he recognized the realist argument that power, including military power, still matters, as does the ‘necessity of prudence and clear thought when the United States is pursuing its national ideals’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ His mental map, however, is grounded in the American character, its history, and national purpose, and is consistent with John Quincy Adams's articulation of America's role in the world, expressed in his 1821 speech to the US House of Representatives: ‘But she [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ For Lake, democracy, open markets, and the rule of law were watchwords for a world in which two revolutions are occurring simultaneously – the economic revolution of a global economy that had encouraged greater interdependence because of technological progress, and a democratic revolution that was still in its infancy, under attack from a number of threats, ranging from ‘backlash states’ to terrorist movements, including cyberterrorism, and international crime syndicates.Footnote ¹¹⁶

These ideas point to a deep strain of the Jeffersonian tradition in Lake's thinking, which favours the role of the United States as an exemplar of democracy to be emulated rather than a nation fulfilling a mission.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, the context of John Quincy Adams's statement is critical, for it was a response to an eagerness on the part of some Americans to apply the nation's democratic principles by intervening in the Greeks’ effort to obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire. While by its nature America constituted a ‘universal cause’, Adams argued it did not have an obligation to intervene abroad to implement that cause. It could carry out ‘its distinctive mission best by steering clear of imposing it by force’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Lake's Vietnam experience accounted for his resistance to this impulse, especially a concern about the United States bogging down in another ‘quagmire’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Nevertheless, the Jeffersonian myth of a virtuous republic was present in his speeches and writings, the American suspicion that power undermines individual liberty and imperils virtue.Footnote ¹²⁰ Lake's pragmatism also borrows from Jefferson's belief in the ‘superiority of practical and “useful” thought over abstract or metaphysical reasoning’.Footnote ¹²¹ As two scholars of Jefferson's statecraft note, the sage of Monticello was ‘the consummate pragmatic statesman, “actively seeking realizable goals within the limits of principle”’.Footnote ¹²² Further, Lake, like Jefferson, understood that the world of policy was one in which principles or normative ideas sometimes must be sacrificed or set aside for the ‘good of the state’, for long-term economic and national security benefits. Acting in this manner, what Michael Walzer called ‘dirty hands’, is intrinsic to governance.Footnote ¹²³ Lake's beliefs also resemble Jefferson's conviction that American prosperity depends on an ‘open trading system’, a faith that US policy objectives can be attained by ‘economic and peaceful means of coercion’, that the power available to a political leader is limited while the aims of foreign policy remain unbounded, and the inseparability of national interest from moral responsibilities.Footnote ¹²⁴ Walter LaFeber claims that Jefferson's foreign policy ‘was a classic example of how the American domestic political economy is inseparable from its foreign policies, and how those policies in turn make demands on domestic political and economic institutions and ideology’.Footnote ¹²⁵ America's noble purpose, according to Jefferson and to his fellow Virginian, James Madison, as the latter espoused in his essay on ‘Universal peace’, was to foster governments that rested on the consent of the governed, establishing a world of republics and, in doing so, guarantee a world of ‘universal and perpetual peace’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Thus, security and welfare at home depended on the ‘fate of freedom in the world’.Footnote ¹²⁷

Lake's description of himself as a ‘pragmatic neo-Wilsonian’ cannot be dismissed offhand either, though he may have stopped using this shorthand to explain his worldview. Both the modifier and the noun are important to comprehending his strategic vision. Individuals and nations never act solely out of principle or interests and as Lake underscored, national interests are rarely defined precisely. The word pragmatic, however, is an essential concept for interpreting American attitudes and behaviour in foreign relations. It has deep roots in the American philosophical tradition, but also in US foreign policy, which political scientists Cecil V. Crabb and Robert Osgood identified in their works. Crabb argued, ‘A pragmatic approach to problem-solving has been an intrinsic feature of the American way of life.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Osgood understood it as the moderator between national self-interest and ideals in America's international conduct. ‘There is a strong element of pragmatic common sense in the American people’, he wrote six decades ago. ‘It needs only to be informed to be effective.’Footnote ¹²⁹ Lake followed in that tradition, particularly his belief in educating the American public on US policy objectives, the importance of honesty in government communication, the essentiality of having public support behind US actions throughout the world, and the quest for a more humanistic US foreign policy.

Employing the adjective ‘pragmatic’ was a means of fending off critics who interpreted ‘Wilsonianism’ as a synonym for utopianism.Footnote ¹³⁰ Lake identified the trap and rejected a complete embrace of Woodrow Wilson's worldview, one that he dismissed as being narrowly moralistic. Lake favoured a ‘modest morality’, which he defined as an unwillingness to impose the American view of morality on others.Footnote ¹³¹ Nevertheless, for Lake, Wilson's ideas were still valuable for underscoring the significant inter-relationship between values and interests, and the ‘conviction…that the internal characteristics of states are decisive in matters of war and peace’.Footnote ¹³² By adding the prefix ‘neo’, Lake and others sympathetic to this tradition in American foreign policy, accepted a role as heirs, but also pointed to a deepening of Wilson's vision of a liberal international order through the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.Footnote ¹³³ The standard of American exceptionalism was equally present. The ‘American experiment’ was designed, as John Kane notes, not simply as a domestic or continental mission, but ‘a universal example that all the world would or should someday imitate’.Footnote ¹³⁴ ‘We have engaged’, Lake declared in a 1995 speech to graduating university students, ‘because American leadership in the world is not a luxury, but a necessity. We are – you are – the world's best hope in the fight against the forces of fear.’Footnote ¹³⁵

A link between Jeffersonian and Wilsonian traditions exists in that both men held the conviction that the United States symbolized something ‘new under the sun’ and its destiny was to lead the world to the new order.Footnote ¹³⁶ In fact, the Jeffersonian credo can be understood, particularly as Madison came to interpret and employ it in his presidency, as a forerunner of Wilsonianism, or as Robert Tucker has characterized it, Wilson ‘refurbished’ the Jeffersonian legacy ‘though in doing so he added new dimensions to that legacy and invested it with new meaning’.Footnote ¹³⁷ While Wilson applied the republican principles to the ‘new era of emerging American supremacy’, Lake applied both to the post-cold war period to create his brand of pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism.

Thus, to be a neo-Wilsonian meant that the United States would commit itself to working with other states to construct an international order that protected peace and prosperity through open markets, institutions, and law, and the promotion of liberal democratic governments, but under US leadership. Meeting the global challenges of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and environmental degradation as well as the rise of emerging powers could not be accomplished otherwise.Footnote ¹³⁸ Diplomacy and economic development, and not military power, would be the principal instruments, and self-determination would be the guiding maxim. For Lake, foreign policy reflected national values and with respect to self-determination, the ‘aim of the United States is not to dictate the specific nature of [political] change’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Such an approach prevented ‘liberal imperialism’, that is, the interventionist impulse that some critics deemed an excessive abuse of US hegemony in the post-cold war period, resting on overly optimistic assumptions about democracy promotion and peace.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ However, unlike some Wilsonians who persisted that the world ‘must be made safe for democracy’, Lake held that ‘democracy makes the world safer for all of us’, arguing, ‘by its nature, democracy provides an inclusive and non-violent means of conflict resolution’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Although Lake self-identified as a practitioner and a diplomat, as indicated earlier, contemporary scholarship moulded his thinking and was absorbed to a degree that it is visibly expressed in the Clinton administration's strategy. For example, Lake borrowed the concept of complex interdependence from the writings of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, especially the importance of ‘multidimensional economic, social and ecological interdependence’.Footnote ¹⁴² While Michael Doyle's important articles on democratic peace theoryFootnote ¹⁴³ were not specifically cited in Lake's writings, it was apparent that he had read Doyle's work when he argued in several speeches and essays that mature democracies do not go to war with one another, and he made this concept, with its roots in Emmanuel Kant's philosophy, a cornerstone of the 1994 National security strategy of engagement and enlargement.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Lake seized upon Ullman's expanded classification of national security and this definition of a new and perilous security environment found its way into the Clinton administration's strategy. Also evident in Lake's worldview is a relentless, unalloyed optimism, recognition that modernity unleashes dangers, disasters, and disorder. He believed that these forces could sometimes be shaped, not controlled, through pragmatic measures that are ‘useful and sustainable’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

To deal with such an environment, Lake sought to define the new world order. His vision did not have the simplistic elegance of Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’, or the neatness of Francis Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ argument. His strategy proposed something more daring and complex – a new international order, a ‘better peace’ after victory in a cold war. This order was based on the solid remnant of the bipolar order, the industrial democracies, and a power shift, economic and military, that favoured the United States. It was an institution-building agenda too, using both cold war era and new institutions in the areas of economics and security.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ However, Lake deemed that order imperilled by old security threats that were now visibly conspicuous in the more fragmented post-cold war international environment, including long-standing regional tensions, and the threats terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction posed.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Yet, Lake's thinking was influenced by other factors, principally American political culture and the ideas embedded in it. The strategy embodies the beliefs and myths associated with the United States, while also recognizing that it seeks to apply its power in the external security environment, thereby creating a foreign policy that fluctuates between ‘idealism and self-interest’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

While an argument can be made that the Clinton administration's institution-building schema ‘was to use multilateral institutions as mechanisms to stabilize and integrate the new and emerging economies into the Western democratic world’,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ that addresses only the international facet. There was a domestic component as well, designed to persuade the US electorate, and, more importantly, a hesitant Congress, to accept the administration's strategy. The administration sold the institutional approach to diverse constituencies as a means of improving an ailing US economy (e.g., North American Free Trade Agreement) and maintaining US military dominance (e.g., NATO enlargement). This line of attack was only partially successful, however, because, after 1994, the administration confronted an often antagonistic and uncooperative Congress when the Republican Party won control of both the House and the Senate in midterm congressional elections. It was a Congress that stymied aspects of the Clinton policy agenda over the next six years, including the Senate's rejection of Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a major defeat for the administration, and haggling over the payment of its financial contribution to the United Nations, a treaty obligation. Thus, the ‘Republican Revolution’ shaped the administration's foreign policy agenda, but by the end of Clinton's second term, scholars and pundits continued to bicker over whether the administration had formulated in its second term a more successful and realistic strategy than the one Lake fashioned during his tenure as national security adviser.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

VI

For Lake, the end of the cold war required continued modification of his schemata of interpretation, that is, his primary framework for ordering experience and meaning, which had been ongoing since the end of his Vietnam experience.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In his mind, the dissolution of the Soviet Union only accelerated the need to decipher and reinterpret the changes in the strategic landscape as the former assumptions, axioms, and rules were no longer completely usable to express and execute US national security policy aims. Changing US interests and the altered behaviour of other states, including the establishment of new ones, demanded innovative frameworks to express motive and intent in this changed environment, and actors that were once on the periphery of power, such as the United Nations, could now be used as a means to effect a new international order, but without sacrificing American hegemony. Thus, language and the search for new symbols to describe the transformed international system found their articulation in the 1994 National security strategy. Containment would be replaced with a strategy of enlargement, and when that term was rejected by other US foreign policy elites in the Clinton administration, ridiculed as sophistry by members of the larger ‘foreign policy community’, and proved a public relations flop, the strategy became one of engagement and enlargement.Footnote ¹⁵² This concept, articulated in a document that the president approved, became the glue that held the coalition of competing foreign policy actors in the administration together for the first term. Nevertheless, while it became the framework for a particular social group, the document was, overall, an expression of Lake's strategic vision, his mental map.

Lake's intellectual pedigree and experience makes him a transitional figure in the shifting generational paradigms associated with US foreign policy from the end of the Vietnam War to the post-cold war era.Footnote ¹⁵³ The war in Indochina swept away the foreign policy establishment who had come of age with Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. A new establishment rose with the Vietnam defeat, with the Carter administration as its first manifestation. This shift has been recognized by scholars but is often obscured by the popular and enduring myth that Ronald Reagan won the cold war. Yet, Reagan followed Carter's lead, using human rights and economic power as instruments. In time, this paradigm too would pass when the Soviet Union disappeared as a menace.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Lake had a place in each of these eras: the child of the 1940s reared in the 1950s, the decade of pragmatic liberalism; the young man who came of age during the Vietnam War; and an influential policy-maker wading into the debate over US foreign policy that has swirled since 1991. It is a debate that continues today because the principal issue remains – defining the role of the United States in the world.