Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [186]
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CHAPTER 12
THE INTELLIGENCE AGENDA: TRANSNATIONAL ISSUES
AS NOTED IN chapter 11, the division between nation state issues and transnational issues is artificial if for no other reason than that the transnational issues all have major centers of activity in nation states. Nonetheless, these transnational issues tend to be addressed in somewhat different ways and raise additional issues for intelligence services.
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY AND INTELLIGENCE AFTER THE COLD WAR
For the first forty-five years of the existence of the intelligence community, one issue dominated its work—the Soviet Union. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Robert Gates (1991-1993) estimated that 50 percent of the intelligence budget went to the Soviet target—meaning the Soviet Union itself; its Warsaw Pact satellites; other states closely aligned to the Soviet Union, such as Cuba; and Soviet activities worldwide. Other issues or regional crises arose from time to time, but the Soviet issue, as defined in chapter 11, remained the primary focus of U.S. intelligence. Also, given the global nature of the cold war, many of the other crises also had salience because they played a role in the bipolar rivalry.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, U.S. national security policy entered into a period of uncertainty in terms of focus and priorities. Several circumstances were salient. First, there was a yearning within the United States for a “peace dividend.” meaning a re-allocation of resources with less going to national security and more to domestic needs. (Cold war spending on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) actually peaked in 1953 at 14.2 percent. During the so-called Reagan build-up, defense spending never went higher than 6.2 percent of GDP. For 1991, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, U.S. defense spending was at 4.6 percent of GDP.) Second, there was a widely held belief that the remaining issues that might challenge U.S. national security were of a much lower order than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union had been. Third, there were a few ultimately futile attempts to create a grand theme (much like containment) under which U.S. national security could be organized. The first Bush administration tried “New World Order.” The Clinton administration briefly tried “Preventive Diplomacy” and later the concepts of engagement and enlargement. These concepts failed because they were too vague, they did not seem to be tied to any specific national security issues, and the United States was content not to be faced with major foreign policy challenges after half a century of world war and then cold war, which included several smaller “hot wars.” There was also an interesting intellectual discussion, prompted primarily by the work of political scientist Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), who argued that the end of the cold war marked the end of ideological conflict and the triumph of western democratic liberalism. At the same time, some assumed that there would be a new “-ism” to confront the United States and other nations with shared values, but no one could define what it might be.
An oft-repeated but misguided question about intelligence was whether the role of intelligence had changed. The question betrayed a certain lack of understanding about intelligence, implying that its role