Ideally, a nation’s foreign policy should reflect its values, character and politics. In that sense, America’s foreign policy in these post-Cold War years is just about right.
A fragmented, hyphenated nation plagued by interest-group politics is projecting a fragmented, hyphenated foreign policy dominated by so many lobbies and interest groups that, on any given day, there seem to be hundreds of policies out there, baffling the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration, which was hired to frame a foreign policy embodying the nation’s role in the world, still seeks a coherent concept to replace the anti-communist Cold War doctrine that served so well for more than 40 years. Anyone with a good idea is invited to contact B. Clinton c/o the White House.
All this might make little difference except that the United States today is overwhelmingly the dominant nation in the world, a focus of power unprecedented since the Roman Empire two millenniums ago. This power carries stupendous global responsibilities that can be discharged only by a mature people who know what kind of world they want and are united on how to get it.
“The only alternative to American power is global anarchy,” contends Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser and one of the establishment lions wrestling with this problem. “That’s the real challenge today.”
The challenge goes beyond that. With communism’s collapse, the United States has a chance to change history, in the same way that it and the West Europeans did after World War II, when the creation of NATO and the European Common Market ended, probably forever, the wars that had ripped Europe.
Great projects like this don’t happen by accident.
The fact is that everything the United States does in the world, however absentmindedly, lands with a terrific thud on somebody else’s country. Other nations view the U.S. as a benign hegemon–a friendly elephant, nice but awfully big, stumbling through the global china shop, and they’re getting tired of repairing the damage that this well-meaning giant can do.
President Clinton was elected on a domestic platform. A nation weary of superpower responsibilities pitched out George Bush, the Persian Gulf war victor, in favor of an Ozarks governor who as a student spent a year in England but who preferred wonking health care and tax policy to debating the East-West balance of power.
What Clinton needed was a secretary of state who would be a sort of vice president for foreign policy, a conceptual type like Dean Acheson or Henry Kissinger. Whom he chose was Warren Christopher, a skilled but colorless lawyer who could carry out policy but not make it.
For his second term, Clinton replaced Christopher with Madeleine Albright, a more dynamic and creative character. But this invited confusion. Clinton is a product of the ’60s whose world view was set by the lesson of Vietnam: Don’t get involved. Albright is a Czech-born Jew whose family fled Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and whose world view was set by the lesson of Munich: Tyrants must be fought, and better sooner than later.
This confusion fits the new, post-Cold War times. A really strong and hostile enemy concentrates the mind. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the American mind has wandered.
In this atmosphere, the United States has not stated a set of clear foreign policy goals and made its action around the globe fit this framework. Instead, it has a rash of little policies, a few set by the White House, some by the Pentagon, some by Departments of the Treasury or Commerce. Is our policy toward China, for instance, aimed at containing China’s military power (Pentagon), or keeping it friendly to American investment (Commerce)? The answer is both, or neither.
Then there’s Congress. During the Cold War, members of Congress would debate U.S. policy but generally made sure that anything they did fit within the overall goal of containing communism. Now, each member seems to have his or her own foreign policy, usually a break for one country or a punishment for another, dictated not by the overall well-being of the United States but by whatever ethnic group back home is making the most noise.
The Irish lobby has pushed the Northern Ireland settlement. The Jewish lobby has propelled U.S. actions against Iran and Iraq, both of which have caused tensions with U.S. allies without noticeably advancing American interests. The Cuban lobby dictated the Helms-Burton Act, which has infuriated America’s best friends. The Armenian lobby has organized American restrictions on aid to Azerbaijan, which sits on top of some of the world’s biggest oil deposits, and in cooperation with the Greek lobby works daily to humiliate Turkey, one of America’s best allies in the eastern Mediterranean.
Each lobby has its congressman or congresswoman. So does every interest group. An obscure New Jersey Republican named Christopher Smith, for instance, has crippled U.S. policy on foreign aid and the United Nations by tying spending in this area to his single-issue opposition to abortion.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the sheer mass of American power has made the need for serious thinking seem less urgent: The U.S. is automatically the leader, whether it knows where it’s going, and other nations have little choice but to follow or get out of the way.
Instead of using this status to build a vision of the future, Washington has set up a rent-a-leader shop, a sort of global 911 number for countries with problems that they want the Americans to solve.
Americans sorted out Northern Ireland and corralled the warring tribes of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The U.S. government has volunteered to reunite Cyprus, is leading the bailout of Indonesia and is mediating Nagorno-Karabakh (in Azerbaijan). When Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization finally shook hands, it happened in the White House Rose Garden.
This solving of relatively small, localized problems is useful, but it is hard to argue that much of it has anything to do with protecting and promoting America’s vital interests, which is what a real foreign policy is supposed to do. In fact, taking on lots of little jobs can distract the administration from focusing on the really big questions, for instance:
– What to do about China? Do we want a strong China, capable of dominating Asia and one day challenging the United States? If not, how do we prevent it? If so, how do we make this strong China a friend? By permitting it to violate human rights and run huge trade surpluses? Or by insisting that it conform to international rules?
– What to do about Russia? Do we want it strong or weak–strong enough to balance China, or weak enough to present no threat to Europe? Must Russia be a democracy? In the long run, this seems unlikely. What do we do then?
– Is Japan a trade rival or a strategic ally? During the Cold War, the alliance took precedence over anger at Japanese protectionism. What about now? Do we want a militarily strong Japan to balance China? Or is a remilitarized Japan a threat to Asia and to us?
– Everyone says we need international cooperation to fight terrorism, but what is being done about it?
– The global economy has a power of its own, beyond the control of any government, as the East Asian nations discovered last fall. How do we control this behemoth? Not by ourselves. But what are we and other major nations doing to cooperate in this task? So far, not much.
In universities and think tanks, professors and recycled government officials are wrestling with these problems. Almost to a person, these experts are Cold War veterans, many of them recycled Sovietologists, who spent most of their careers absorbed by Moscow and the East-West clash and have had a terrible time adjusting to the new, unipolar world.
This may be why so many academics oppose one of the few useful big ideas under debate now, the expansion of NATO. This opposition is based on arguments that expansion will anger the Russians and prevent Russian ratification of the START-II treaty. The facts that NATO expansion is not a big issue in Russia, that Moscow has signed a cooperation treaty with NATO and that START-II is moving toward ratification has not made much impact on these thinkers, who are doing what they always have done–fixating on Russia and ignoring Poland and the other nations in between.
Some scholars have tried to draw new global frameworks. At Harvard University, Samuel P. Huntington sees a future dominated by clashes among Islam, the West, China and the other great civilizations. At Georgetown University, Brzezinski says we should focus on the Eurasian land mass, which holds about 75 percent of the world’s people. At the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer seeks a “realist” approach, a hard-headed and combative conception of the national interest mixed with a whiff of isolationism.
None of this has enjoyed the influence of the “X Article,” the 1947 article by George Kennan that proposed containment of the Soviet Union and so charted America’s entire Cold War policy. At the time, Kennan was a relatively unsung Soviet specialist in the State Department, part of a new elite of foreign policy thinkers and practitioners who emerged from World War II.
There are lessons here. The next Kennan may be a junior diplomat whose thinking has been shaped since the Cold War ended. The next “X” article, when it appears, will need the support of a new elite of thinkers and practitioners; foreign policy, unlike domestic policy, works best when it is framed and carried out by an elite with deep roots in American values and a broad experience of the world.
Foreign policies dreamed up by congressmen responding to their noisiest constituents back home do more harm than good, as recent experience has shown. A constituent-driven foreign policy sounds democratic and wholesome; in fact, it is a disaster.
Mostly, any new policy, no matter how brilliant, needs the support of a president like Harry Truman who may not be a global expert himself but is willing to work as hard at foreign affairs as he does on domestic issues.
The United States is the world’s dominant power now but if history teaches anything at all, this won’t last. One day the world will return to normal, with several powers, some of them hostile, challenging this dominance. America’s chore now, during these palmy times, is to prepare for more dangerous times to come.
